Getting started
DotDeployer works the same way no matter which cloud account you connect. Here’s the path from sign-up to a live site.
- Sign up and sign in. Continue with Google, continue with GitHub, or email and password — all three go through the same sign-in screen.
- Connect a provider. Go to Settings → Providers and add one of the six: Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Akamai (Linode), AWS EC2, or Custom VPS if you already have a server. For the first five, paste the account token or key the provider page for that provider asks for — it’s encrypted before it’s stored, and it’s the only thing DotDeployer needs to provision on your behalf. For Custom VPS, give DotDeployer the server’s IP and a temporary root login instead of a token.
- Install the GitHub App. Under Settings → Repositories, grant DotDeployer access to the repository you want to deploy — just that repo, not your whole GitHub account.
- Create a server. From Servers, click “Create server.” Pick the provider you connected, then a size and region from that provider’s live list. DotDeployer provisions it and hardens it automatically — a locked-down deploy user, a firewall, security patching kept current, and the ASP.NET Core runtime your project needs.
- Add a site. From Sites, click “Add site” and point it at the server, the repo, the branch to deploy, and the project path inside it (for a solution with multiple projects). DotDeployer detects the .NET version.
- Set environment variables. On the site page’s Environment tab, add anything your app reads from configuration — connection strings, API keys — encrypted at rest.
- Deploy. DotDeployer builds your project on the server and releases it. HTTPS is issued automatically the first time a domain is attached.
- Watch the log. The site page’s Deployments tab opens a live log drawer for every deployment, line by line.
- Push to deploy. From here on, a push to your branch is a deploy through the GitHub App webhook. No pipeline file to write or maintain.
- Roll back if you need to. DotDeployer keeps the last five releases. If a deploy goes wrong, use the Rollback button on the site page to switch back to any of them in one click.
