Sample deployments

The Confabulous-maintained instances run on two different stacks. Both configurations are public and you can copy from them.

Fly.io — confabulous.dev (managed)

The free managed instance at confabulous.dev runs on Fly.io, using:

• App + worker as separate Fly processes from a single image.
• Tigris (Fly Object Storage) for S3-compatible session-blob storage.
• Neon as the managed Postgres provider — connection string passed in as DATABASE_URL (a Fly secret).
• Resend for share-invitation email.
• Honeycomb for OpenTelemetry traces.
• Anthropic for Smart Recaps.

The full configuration lives in the repo at fly.toml, with the deploy script at deploy-to-fly.sh.

Notable choices for a Fly.io deployment:

• Two [[vm]] blocks — one for the app process (auto-stop enabled), one for the always-on worker singleton.
• S3_ENDPOINT = "fly.storage.tigris.dev" for Tigris, with S3_USE_SSL = "true".
• Secrets (AWS_*, CSRF_SECRET_KEY, RESEND_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS) are set via fly secrets set, not in fly.toml.
• auto_stop_machines = 'stop' plus min_machines_running = 1 keeps response latency low while letting unused machines stop on idle.

Deploying

# One-time:
fly launch  # or `fly deploy` if the app already exists

# Run database migrations against the production DB, then deploy:
export PRODUCTION_DATABASE_URL='postgresql://user:pass@host/db?sslmode=require'
./deploy-to-fly.sh

Linode — demo.confabulous.dev (demo)

demo.confabulous.dev runs on a ~$7/month Linode Nanode (1 GB + backups). The full infra-as-code lives in ConfabulousDev/confab-demo-site — the Deployment walkthrough stack plus Demo mode, Caddy for HTTPS, and MAX_USERS=0.

What’s in the repo:

• stack/ — docker-compose.yml and Caddyfile.
• tofu/ — OpenTofu for the Linode VM and firewall. cloud-init.yaml.tftpl renders stack/ plus secrets into /opt/confab/ on first boot and starts the stack via systemd. ignore_changes = [metadata] keeps later applys from rebuilding the VM.
• scripts/deploy.sh — image and compose updates. Infra goes through tofu apply; secrets are edited in /opt/confab/.env on the VM.

Cloudflare DNS is added by hand so no DNS token lives in the repo.

Picking a stack

If you want…	Use
Managed PaaS, scale-to-zero, minimal ops	Fly.io (or similar — Railway, Render)
Full control of a VM, low monthly cost	Linode VPS (or DigitalOcean, Hetzner) + Docker Compose + Caddy
Enterprise infra, OIDC SSO	Bring your own — k8s, ECS, etc. Confabulous is just a single Docker image plus Postgres + S3.