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Deployment and hosting options

After building your application, the next step is to make it available to users. This is where deployment and hosting comes in.

Bolt doesn’t have built-in hosting for your projects. You can choose to:

  • Use Bolt’s Netlify integration: this connects Bolt to Netlify, enabling one-click deployments from within Bolt. You’ll need to design your project with Netlify’s hosting in mind. Follow the Netlify integration guide to set this up and to learn more about building for Netlify.
  • For mobile applications, build with Expo and deploy to the app stores. Follow the Expo integration guide.
  • Connect to GitHub and set up deployments from GitHub using other CI/CD tools: this is a common devops pattern. The GitHub integration guide walks you through connecting Bolt and GitHub. You’ll then need to set up your own build and deployment tools.
  • Download your project, and use any deployment option you prefer.

If you’re new to building applications and not sure what option to choose, Bolt’s connection to Netlify is the quickest to set up.

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New to hosting

You don’t have to understand deployment and hosting to start building with Bolt, but once you get to the point of deploying your application, it helps to have some knowledge of the concepts and terminology.

If you’re completely new to deploying and hosting websites and web apps, here’s a brief introduction to key concepts. Note that this description is a simplified version of a complex topic. It assumes you’re building a fairly standard site.

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Users, browsers, and servers

When you build a website or application, you need a way to get it to users. For any website or web app, this means hosting the site on a server. The interaction with the site goes like this:

  1. A user goes to your website in their browser.
  2. The browser asks the server for the site.
  3. The server sends the website pages to the browser.
  4. The browser displays the site.

Depending on how complicated your site is, there may be multiple messages between the browser and server as the user interacts with the site.

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Key terms

  • CI/CD: continuous integration and continuous delivery. This is a devops practice, involving automating the processes to building, testing, and deploying code. GitLab provides a good introductory guide: CI/CD explained.
  • Deployment: the process of getting your code onto your server.
  • Devops: development operations.

    the integration and automation of the software development and information technology operations (from Wikipedia)

  • Hosting: storing your project on a server and making it available to users.
  • Interaction: anything the user does. This includes entering a URL to go to a site, as well as things like clicking buttons or submitting forms.
  • Request: the browser sends a message to the server.
  • Response: the server replies to the browser.
  • Web apps: interactive software applications that run in a browser. For example, Bolt itself is a web app.