Building Web Apps with Bolt

Chapter 7. Deploying Your App with Netlify Integration

Up to now, we’ve been running our Movie Explorer app in Bolt’s development environment (essentially on your local machine, through the browser). Now it’s time to deploy the app, which means making it accessible on the internet with its own URL. We will use Netlify to host our Movie Explorer. Netlify is a popular hosting platform for modern web projects, particularly Jamstack apps. It automates building, deploying, and serving websites and web applications.

Deployment can be a tricky step in traditional development (involving servers, configurations, CI/CD pipelines, and the like), but Bolt’s integration with Netlify simplifies it to just a few clicks. Bolt’s integration means that we can trigger the deployment from within Bolt’s interface. Bolt will handle packaging the app (running the build step) and sending it to Netlify. Netlify will then host it on a public URL (likely something like your-app-name.netlify.app, though Netlify does support custom domains as well).

This chapter will guide you through:

• Connecting your Bolt project to Netlify

• Deploying the app (with a look at what actually happens under the hood during deployment)

• Verifying the live site and testing all features on production

• Managing any configuration needed for production (like environment variables for API keys)

• Making the deployment process repeatable, so you can update the site as you improve the app

By the end, you’ll have your Movie Explorer ...