I’ve just found out about Cleavr on the site of Strapi and I have a few questions.
I’m interested in deploying Strapi on Hetzner and is still not 100% clear me to what exactly Cleavr offers in comparison to the other Strapi deployment options (Deployment - Strapi Developer Docs).
If I’m not mistaken, If I choose to deploy Strapi on the DigitalOcean App Platform then I can easily create two boxes, one for the app and one for the DB, which can communicate securely with each other. I don’t have to deal with security (certificates…), scaling (load balancers…) etc. Now If I choose to deploy Strapi via Cleavr do I get the same? Would Cleavr automatically provision and configure the needed servers on Hetzner or it just installs Strapi and the DB on one server and I have to deal myself with security and scalability?
Cleavr connects to several hosting providers (Hetzner, DO, Linode, UpCloud, Vultr, and others via custom server setups) and you can provision servers on connected providers directly from Cleavr. Cleavr will harden the server a bit during the provisioning process - such as, installs Fail2Ban, installs UFW firewall, requires SSH connections (you may also change SSH port), etc as well as will install / configure NGINX and site dependencies, such as Node for Strapi apps. You can still opt to scale servers from witihin your hosting provider account and beyond the security measures Cleavr installs / configures, ultimately, customers are responsible for server security.
For server architecture, you can opt to provision a separate database server for the app to connect to. The default in Cleavr is to install a db on same server as the app.
Some additional features that are beneficial for Strapi apps are the GitHub Actions integration to build the app (the build step for Strapi is pretty hefty), persistent file storage, PM2 to keep app alive.
Give it a try and let us know what you think. We’re always open to hearing how we can improve Cleavr to make it more simple to spin up servers and deploy apps!