Deployment

bun-actionhero runs as two separate applications — a backend API server and a frontend Next.js app. This is intentional. You can deploy them together on the same box, or put the frontend on Vercel and the backend on a VPS, or containerize everything with Docker. Each app is independent.

Production Build

# compile both applications
bun compile

# set NODE_ENV=production in .env, then start
bun start

Docker

Each app has its own Dockerfile, and there's a docker-compose.yml to run everything together:

docker compose up

This starts the backend, frontend, PostgreSQL, and Redis. You probably won't use this exact setup in production, but it shows how the pieces fit together and gives you a working reference for your own deployment config.

Separate Applications

Rather than bundling the frontend into the backend (like the original ActionHero did with plugins), the frontend and backend are separate Bun applications. This means you can:

• Deploy them independently — frontend on Vercel, backend on Railway, whatever works
• Scale them independently — maybe you need more API capacity but the frontend is fine
• Develop them independently — cd frontend && bun dev works without the backend

In development, bun dev from the root runs both concurrently with hot reload.

Environment Variables

Set production config through environment variables. The config system (see Configuration) handles the rest:

NODE_ENV=production
DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:pass@host:5432/dbname
REDIS_URL=redis://host:6379/0
APPLICATION_URL=https://api.example.com
WEB_SERVER_PORT=8080

Database Migrations

Migrations auto-apply on server start when DATABASE_AUTO_MIGRATE=true (the default). If you'd rather run them explicitly before deploying:

cd backend && bun run migrations

This generates migration files from schema changes into ./drizzle/. They'll be applied automatically the next time the server starts — or you can set DATABASE_AUTO_MIGRATE=false and handle it yourself.