# Deploy to Render.com
Render.com offers a free tier that includes 750 hours of compute time per month.  This is enough to run a single proxy instance 24/7.  Instances shut down after 15 minutes without traffic but start up again automatically when a request is received.  You can use something like https://app.checklyhq.com/ to ping your proxy every 15 minutes to keep it alive.

### 1. Create account
- [Sign up for Render.com](https://render.com/) to create an account and access the dashboard.

### 2. Create a service using a Blueprint
Render allows you to deploy and auutomatically configure a repository containing a [render.yaml](../render.yaml) file using its Blueprints feature.  This is the easiest way to get started.

- Click the **Blueprints** tab at the top of the dashboard.
- Click **New Blueprint Instance**.
- Under **Public Git repository**, enter `https://gitlab.com/khanon/oai-proxy`.
  - Note that this is not the GitGud repository, but a mirror on GitLab.
- Click **Continue**.
- Under **Blueprint Name**, enter a name.
- Under **Branch**, enter `main`.
- Click **Apply**.

The service will be created according to the instructions in the `render.yaml` file.  Don't wait for it to complete as it will fail due to missing environment variables.  Instead, proceed to the next step.

### 3. Set environment variables
- Return to the **Dashboard** tab.
- Click the name of the service you just created, which may show as "Deploy failed".
- Click the **Environment** tab.
- Click **Add Secret File**.
- Under **Filename**, enter `.env`.
- Under **Contents**, enter all of your environment variables, one per line, in the format `NAME=value`.
  - For example, `OPENAI_KEY=sk-abc123`.
- Click **Save Changes**.

The service will automatically rebuild and deploy with the new environment variables.  This will take a few minutes.  The link to your deployed proxy will appear at the top of the page.

If you want to change the URL, go to the **Settings** tab of your Web Service and click the **Edit** button next to **Name**.  You can also set a custom domain, though I haven't tried this yet.

# Optional

## Updating the server

To update your server, go to the page for your Web Service and click **Manual Deploy** > **Deploy latest commit**.  This will pull the latest version of the code and redeploy the server.

_If you have trouble with this, you can also try selecting **Clear build cache & deploy** instead from the same menu._

## Adding a greeting message

To show a greeting message on the Server Info page, set the `GREETING_URL` environment variable within Render to the URL of a Markdown file.  This URL should point to a raw text file, not an HTML page. You can use a public GitHub Gist or GitLab Snippet for this.  For example: `GREETING_URL=https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2542011/raw/main/greeting.md`.  You can change the title of the page by setting the `SERVER_TITLE` environment variable.

Don't set `GREETING_URL` in the `.env` secret file you created earlier; it must be set in Render's environment variables section for it to work correctly.

## Customizing the server

You can customize the server by editing the `.env` configuration you created earlier. Refer to [.env.example](../.env.example) for a list of all available configuration options. Further information can be found in the [config.ts](../src/config.ts) file.