oai-reverse-proxy/docs/deploy-render.md

Deploy to Render.com

⚠️ This method is no longer recommended. Please use the self-hosting instructions instead.

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 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 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.

IMPORTANT: Set TRUSTED_PROXIES=3, otherwise users' IP addresses will not be recorded correctly (the server will see the IP address of Render's load balancer instead of the user's real IP address).

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 for a list of all available configuration options. Further information can be found in the config.ts file.