Shipping & Running
$definedeploy--plain-english
TLDROpen the doors so other people can use it.
Localhost is a dress rehearsal. Deploy is opening night.
Your app on http://localhost:3000 is real to you. It is imaginary to a judge on the other side of the room. Deploy means you put the thing on a computer that stays on, give it a public URL, and let strangers hit refresh.
That's it. Not "the cloud." Not "DevOps." A URL that works when your laptop is closed.
The two rooms, again
You often deploy twice:
Sometimes one platform does both. Sometimes you tape two URLs together and pray CORS is in a good mood. The builder's deploy options are just "which lobby do you want to stand in."
Staging vs production
Production is the house with guests inside. Staging is the dress rehearsal room next door. You break staging on purpose. You treat production like a live mic.
At a hackathon, staging is a luxury. You will deploy straight to production. That's fine. Make the first deploy early, while the app still says "hello," so the second deploy is a habit instead of a boss fight.
Rollback is the fire exit
Shipping the broken version is not the disaster. Having no way back is the disaster. A platform that lets you click "previous deploy" is worth more than a clever Dockerfile you wrote during lunch.
What this unlocks
Until you deploy, you have a project. After you deploy, you have a link. Links are what people open. Everything else is rehearsal.
