Quickstart

Quickstart

Clever Cloud provides an automated hosting platform for developers. Deploy your app easily and launch dependencies without having to worry about the infrastructure set up. Follow this guide to get ready to deploy quickly as you learn the basics of Clever Cloud.

Create a Clever Cloud Account

The API of Clever Cloud uses OAuth 1 to perform authentication actions. There are two ways to signup to Clever Cloud: email or GitHub login.

Go to the Clever Cloud Console and select the method you prefer.

Two Factor Authentication (2FA)

Clever Cloud supports 2FA. You can enable it here: https://console.clever-cloud.com/users/me/authentication

Please, backup your recovery codes, we won’t be able to restore access to your account if you lose access to your regular codes.

Deploy your code

What’s an Application on Clever Cloud

An application is defined on Clever Cloud by the following elements:

  • a dedicated language/framework;
  • a deployment method (FTP and/or Git);
  • resources consumption (CPU, RAM, Disk…), depending on the language or framework used;
  • an optional configuration file you may add to your project.

If one of these elements is missing, Clever Cloud can’t deploy your application properly (except the configuration file, optional in some cases).

How it Works

When you push an application’s code to git or via FTP, the platform receives it and checks the resource’s requirements. If they are complete, the deployment is launched. When finished and successful, the application is up and running.

The log system retrieves all output from the application and displays it in the logs tab of your application in the Clever Cloud console.

Supported Platforms

Create an Application Step by Step

In the Clever Cloud Console:

Select the organization

Choose the organization you want to deploy in from the left menu. At this point you must only have the Personal Space but you can create one.

Click on “Create an application”

Find it in the Organization Manager panel, at the top left of the left menu. This starts the application creation wizard. If your account has been linked to GitHub, you can select a repository from your GitHub account.
If you want to deploy an application within a GitHub organisation, first grant the Clever Cloud API access to it.

Select the language

Choose the language or the framework you want to deploy.

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Optional: For PHP applications, you can choose between FTP and Git deployment.

Fine-tune your scaling configuration

Horizontal scaling is the number of instances that can run at the same time. Vertical scaling sets the minimum and maximum size the instance can be.

Name your application

Enter the name and the description of your application.

Optional steps

Choose How to Deploy

Troubleshooting

Git ⋅ Remote is asking for a password

If the remote asks you for a password right after a git push attempt, this may be due to a SSH Key misconfiguration.

Add your SSH key to your profile here: https://console.clever-cloud.com/users/me/ssh-keys

The full tutorial about adding SSH key is here: Adding SSH keys

Git ⋅ Unable to resolve the reference master

You are probably trying to push from another branch. Remeber that:

  • You can only push to the master branch for deployment. Trying to push to another branch will trigger an error.
  • You cannot push a tag (which refers to a commit) to the remote repository. If you do so, no deployment will be triggered.
  • In order to push to master from a non-master local branch, use this syntax:
git push <remote-name> <branch-name>:master
GitHub ⋅ Does not appear to be a git repository

You can’t directly push to an application created on Clever Cloud as a GitHub app: in this case, only the automatic deployment from GitHub is henceforth allowed.

If you try to push to Clever Cloud, as you would do for a non-GitHub app, you will get the following error :

fatal: '/data/repositories/<app_id>.git' does not
appear to be a git repository

Indeed, no git repository is created on Clever Cloud because the application is directly cloned from GitHub.

If you have to push directly to a repo in order to deploy an application (eg if you deploy from a CI), then create a non-GitHub app.

Manage your Application

There are many tabs available in the application’s menu on Clever Console:

  • Information: General information about your application
  • Scalability: Set-up scalability options
  • Domain names: Manage custom domain names
  • Environment variables: Manage environment variables
  • Service dependencies: Link add-ons and applications
  • Exposed configuration: Manage exposed environment variables
  • Activity: Track last deployments
  • Logs: Visualize application’s logs
  • Metrics: Visualize application’s metrics
  • Consumption: Visualize your application’s consumption.

Create your first add-on

Applications often requires one or more services in addition to the runtime itself. Add-ons are services you can use independently, or you can link them with your application(s). For instance, you may want to add a database or a caching system to your application or just have a database with no linked application.

An add-on can be shared by different applications to share data between them. It can be a database shared by two or three applications of your infrastructure for example, or they can be independent.

Most of the add-ons catalog is provided by Clever Cloud, but vendors are also allowed to provide services external to Clever Cloud (See how to integrate your SaaS with Clever Cloud)

Available add-ons

Clever Cloud provides multiple add-ons to work with your applications:

If your add-on:

Add-on Billing

There are two kinds of billing:

  • Per-month billing: Add-ons with fixed resources (storage, CPU and RAM)
  • Per-usage billing: Add-ons based on consumption, like FS Bucket and Cellar
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Free Plan: Add-ons having a free plan are meant for testing purposes, not production usage. These add-ons usually rely on shared resources, resulting in variable, non-guaranteed performances and stability. Shared clusters may not be running the same version as dedicated instances.
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Your invoice: Per usage billing will be taken on runtime credits each day, while per-month add-ons will create a new line in the monthly invoice.

Manage your Add-on

Once an add-on is created, at least two tabs are available in the Clever Cloud console:

  • Add-on dashboard: This screen provides and overview of your add-on and its options, depending on the type of add-on it is.
Example of the dashoard tab of an add-on
Example of the dashoard tab of an add-on
  • Information tab: This screen sums-up the characteristics of the selected add-on. Features and environment variables (if applicable) are shown.

Other tabs may be available, depending on the add-on type.

Delete an add-on

To delete an add-on:

  1. Go to the Information tab of the add-on.
  2. Click on Remove add-on.
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After deletion of the add-on, all associated data will be removed.
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