Fullstack Production Deployment & Operations

For portals running OAuth sign-in, community forums, course entitlements, and payment webhooks, orchestrate the application and PostgreSQL 16 with docker-compose.yml + docker-compose.prod.yml.

1. Standard Startup Flow

# 1. Prepare production environment variables
cp .env.example .env
# Required: BASE_URL, JWT_SECRET (>= 32 chars), POSTGRES_PASSWORD

# 2. Launch application + PostgreSQL 16 (SeaORM migrations run automatically)
docker compose up -d

# 3. Inspect logs and verify health probe
docker compose logs -f app
curl -fsS http://127.0.0.1:8080/healthz

2. Decoupling Open-Source Engine & Private Content (Best Practice)

To pull upstream DioxusPress releases cleanly with zero merge conflicts, keep your site's real documentation, paid courses, blog posts, and brand assets in a separate Git repository:

/srv/my-site-content/
├── site.json          # Site-specific branding, layout, theme, and module configuration
├── images/            # Custom logos, favicons, and Open Graph cards (served first at /images/*)
├── docs/              # Documentation volumes (supports optional index.en.md companions)
├── posts/             # Blog posts and authors.yml
└── courses/           # Free-preview and paid courses

Mount /srv/my-site-content read-only at /app/content (CONTENT_DIR=/app/content):

• Brand image overlay: Requests to /images/* check $CONTENT_DIR/images/ first and gracefully fall back to built-in assets/images/;
• Zero-downtime incremental hot reload (SIGHUP): Publishing new docs, blog posts, or course lessons only requires syncing the content repo on the host and sending SIGHUP (docker kill --signal=HUP dioxuspress-app). Without dropping a single active TCP connection, the server atomically refreshes site.json, directory caches, and weak ETag epochs while incrementally updating Tantivy segments in the background (and even without SIGHUP, the built-in CONTENT_DIR watcher reconciles changes within 5 seconds).

# Zero-downtime content release (no image rebuild, 0 dropped connections)
git -C /srv/my-site-content pull --ff-only
docker kill --signal=HUP dioxuspress-app

3. Persistent Volumes & Backup Checklist

Back up three stateful paths in production:

1. PostgreSQL data volume: Run scheduled pg_dump -Fc snapshots to off-site object storage;
2. User uploads (/app/assets/uploads): Stores images uploaded in forum posts and comments;
3. Search index (/app/data/search-index): Rebuilds automatically from Markdown and PostgreSQL if empty, while keeping a persistent volume makes incremental checks millisecond-fast.