Deploy to production
Railway (recommended)
Railway (opens in a new tab) is currently the best place to deploy Ponder apps. Most Ponder apps cost ~$5 per month, and the deployment process is simple.
Sign up or log in to Railway
Connect your GitHub account, and make sure that your Ponder app has been pushed to remote.
Create a Ponder app service
From the Railway console:
- Click New Project → Deploy from GitHub repo and select your repo from the list
- Click Add variables, then add your project's RPC URL (e.g.
PONDER_RPC_URL_1) and any other environment variables - Expose your service to the public internet. Open the Settings tab and click Generate Domain under Environment
- Set a healthcheck path. In the Settings tab, enter
/healthfor Healthcheck Path under Deploy
Monorepo users: You'll need to update your service's Start Command. This
can be found under Settings → Deploy → Start Command. Make sure
the command runs ponder start at the Ponder project root (e.g. cd packages/ponder && pnpm start).
Create a Postgres database service
- From your project's dashboard, click New → Database → Add PostgreSQL.
- Go back to your service. Open Variables tab and click on New Variable
- Click on Add Reference, select
DATABASE_URL, and click on Add
After a moment, your Ponder service should redeploy successfully. Check the Build Logs and Deploy Logs tabs to debug any issues.
Zero-downtime deployments
Ponder supports zero-downtime deployments by waiting until all events have been processed before responding as healthy. To support long-running backfills, Ponder apps will begin responding as healthy before the backfill is complete if it exceeds the maxHealthcheckDuration. This option defaults 240 seconds (4 minutes), and is configurable using options.maxHealthcheckDuration.
If you're using Railway, Ponder will set maxHealthcheckDuration automatically according to the Healthcheck Timeout specified in your app service settings.
Other cloud providers
Ponder has not been thoroughly tested on cloud providers other than Railway. However, Ponder apps should work in any environment that supports Node.js and can connect to a Postgres database.
