Launch

Deploying Your App to the World

Vibe Coder 101 · Phase 4: Production-Ready · Stage 21 of 38 · about 16 min

Everything so far has run on your own computer, where only you can see it. Deploying is moving it somewhere always-on so anyone with the link can use it.

This is the step people build up in their heads. It is genuinely a few minutes once you know which kind of app you have.

Which kind do you have?

Static — files that just get sent to the browser: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images. No program running on the server. Cheap or free to host, very fast, very hard to break.

Server-side — something has to be running to answer requests, usually because there is a database or secret keys involved. More setup, and it costs a little.

If you are unsure: does your app need a secret key or a shared database? If no, it is almost certainly static.

Picking a host

For a first launch, choose on these, in order: free tier, https included, custom domain supported, you can undo a bad deploy. Several well-known hosts tick all four for static sites. Do not overthink it — moving later is easy.

The pieces of a real address

Three things you will meet, in plain words:

  • A domain — the name people type. You rent it, yearly.
  • DNS — the phone book that points your name at your host. Changes here can take a while to spread, which is normal and not something you broke.
  • A certificate — the thing that makes it https and removes the "not secure" warning. Most hosts do this for you.

If you host on a big cloud provider directly, you assemble those pieces yourself — a storage bucket for the files, a delivery network in front, a certificate, and DNS records. It is not hard, but it is fiddly, and it is the step where first-timers stall.

Vibe Coder Playground can do that assembly for you on AWS: it creates the storage, requests the certificate, sets up the delivery network with the storage kept private, and tells you the exact two DNS records to paste at your registrar. Then publishing is a button.

Before you point a domain at it

  • Run the audit from stage 13 and clear anything critical.
  • Hunt for placeholder text. "Lorem ipsum", "Your Company Here", a dummy phone number. This is the single most common embarrassment.
  • Check no secrets are in the files you are uploading.
  • Open it on a phone. Actually on a phone.
  • Know how to undo. Before you need to.

After it is live

Visit the real address in a browser you have never used for the project — no cache, no leftover data, exactly like a stranger. Things that "worked" often turn out to have been working only for you.

Go deeper

From Prototype to Production covers the wider gap between "works on my machine" and "works for everyone", and the placeholder sweep is worth doing the day you launch.