#Bay Deployment

Bay is a self-hosted application server for Alepha apps. Where Cloudflare gives you someone else's serverless platform, Bay runs your apps as ordinary long-lived processes on a machine you own — with TLS, rollback and process isolation handled for you.

Use it when you want a long-lived runtime (background work between requests, in-process caches, a local SQLite file), when you would rather pay for one VPS than per-request, or when the data has to stay on hardware you control.

#Build

alepha build --target=bare

That is the whole target-specific story: Bay has no wrangler.jsonc equivalent, because everything it needs is already in the build manifest. alepha platform up runs this for you.

#Configuration

1platform({2  environments: {3    production: {4      adapter: "bay",5      endpoint: "https://admin.example.com",6      domain: "myapp.com",7    },8  },9});

endpoint is the Bay admin panel that owns the machine, and it is required — unlike Cloudflare there is no global endpoint to fall back on, because a Bay is a machine someone owns. Set it in the config or export BAY_ENDPOINT.

#Log in

alepha platform auth login --env production

This runs an OAuth device flow (RFC 8628) against the endpoint: the CLI prints a code, you approve it in the browser, and the credential is stored with its refresh token so long deploys do not expire mid-flight. The endpoint must be a Bay admin panel with its OAuth server enabled, and the approving user needs the admin role.

For CI, skip the flow and export a key instead:

BAY_API_KEY=... alepha platform up --env production

alepha platform auth logout --env production

#Deploy

alepha platform up --env production

Under the hood: alepha build --target=bare, then alepha pack — which produces <project>-latest.tar.gz containing the bundle and its migrations/ directory — then an upload of that artifact to the endpoint.

Bay takes it from there: it reads the manifest, creates the database, the storage directory and the cron entries the app declares, starts the new release, waits for /health to answer, swaps traffic over, and keeps the previous release around to roll back to if readiness never arrives.

#Resources

You do not provision anything from the CLI. Cloudflare needs provision because D1, R2 and KV are account-level resources created through an API; Bay creates what the manifest asks for on the machine itself, at deploy time.

The practical consequence: alepha platform status reports the running app and its release, and reports empty database and storage lists. That is deliberate honesty rather than a gap — Bay exposes no inventory of what it created, and listing what the manifest asked for would report intent as fact.

#Migrations

There is no migrate step, and alepha platform migrate is a no-op on Bay.

Migrations are the app's own business here: Alepha runs them during its own boot as soon as a migrations/ directory sits next to the bundle, and alepha pack always includes one. Redeploying the app is migrating it.

#Status and teardown

alepha platform status --env production
alepha platform down --env production

down removes the app from the Bay. Note that on Bay the database and the uploads live inside the app's own directory, so tearing an environment down takes its data with it — there is no separate managed database that outlives the app.

#Bay versus Cloudflare

Both provision from your $repository / $storage / $cache / $job declarations — you do not maintain infrastructure config by hand on either.

#Full example

 1// alepha.config.ts 2import { defineConfig } from "alepha/cli/config"; 3import { platform } from "alepha/cli/platform"; 4  5export default defineConfig({ 6  plugins: [ 7    platform({ 8      environments: { 9        production: {10          adapter: "bay",11          endpoint: "https://admin.example.com",12          domain: "myapp.com",13        },14        staging: {15          adapter: "bay",16          endpoint: "https://admin.example.com",17        },18      },19    }),20  ],21});

alepha platform auth login --env production
alepha platform plan --env production   # shows what will happen, touches nothing
alepha platform up --env production