Deploy

You can deploy your Ponder app to any cloud environment that supports Node.js.

• Railway
• Self-hosting

Railway

Railway's general-purpose cloud platform is a great starting point for most Ponder apps.

Self hosting

In general, hosting a Ponder app is similar to hosting a normal Node.js HTTP server. Rather than offer a step-by-step guide, this section describes the key Ponder-specific quirks to consider when self-hosting.

Database connection

In production, Ponder works best with a Postgres database in the same private network. Set the DATABASE_URL environment variable to the connection string of your Postgres database, or manually override the database.connectionString option in ponder.config.ts.

import { createConfig } from "@ponder/core";
 
export default createConfig({
  database: {
    kind: "postgres",
    connectionString: "postgres://user:password@mycloud.internal:5432/database",
  },
  // ... more config
});

Database schema

When a Ponder app starts up, it attempts to create user tables (defined in ponder.schema.ts) in the target schema. If another Ponder app is currently using that schema, the app will crash shortly after startup with the error Schema 'public' is locked by a different Ponder app. This locking mechanism avoids issues caused by two Ponder apps writing to the same tables simultaneously.

The default schema is public. This works fine during development, but causes problems in production when multiple deployments share the same database. During a zero-downtime redeployment, the new deployment will fail because the public schema is locked by the old deployment.

To avoid this problem, set the schema option in ponder.config.ts to a deployment-specific value. The best choice for schema depends on your environment - on Railway, Ponder automatically detects and uses the RAILWAY_DEPLOYMENT_ID environment variable. In a Kubernetes cluster, the pod name is often a great choice:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: ponder-deployment
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: ponder
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: ponder
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: ponder
          # ...
          env:
            - name: POD_NAME
              valueFrom:
                fieldRef:
                  fieldPath: metadata.name

import { createConfig } from "@ponder/core";
 
export default createConfig({
  database: {
    kind: "postgres",
    connectionString: process.env.DATABASE_URL,
    schema: process.env.POD_NAME,
  },
  // ... more config
});

Health checks & probes

Use the /health and /ready endpoints to configure health checks or probes.

• /health: Returns an HTTP 200 response immediately after the process starts.
• /ready: Returns an HTTP 200 response once indexing progress has reached realtime across all chains. During the historical backfill, the endpoint returns an HTTP 503 response.