Deploying Your App

This page explains the most common ways to deploy your app to a remote server.

Basics 

Every THT app includes a standalone copy of the THT runtime.

This means if your server has PHP installed, you can simply copy your app to the remote server and it will usually work without any changes.

However, you will need to install THT on the remote server if you need to run the tht command.

Copying Files 

To copy files to your remote server, here are a couple of apps that you can use:

• Cyberduck (PC & Mac)
• WinSCP (PC only)

Document Root 

Make sure your webserver is pointing to your app’s public directory as the Document Root.

If you are using a shared hosting provider, this is usually set up via their control panel.

In Dreamhost, it looks something like this:

Troubleshooting 

If you run into any issues, you can run tht fix on the remote server.

This will safely update your app and fix some common problems.

$ cd path/to/myApp
$ tht fix

This will:

• Clear the app cache
• Set necessary file permissions

Manual Troubleshooting

If this does not fix an issue, double-check the following:

• Your webserver Document Root is set to your public folder.
• Create a simple test.html in public and see if it is served correctly.
• Permissions are set on your app directory so the webserver has read/write access. (see below)

Permissions 

Permissions are a common source of errors during deployment.

The webserver’s user account will need these permissions:

• read access to your app directory
• write access to your app’s data directory

If tht fix does not work, you may need to update permissions manually.

For example, on Linux, you might run this command to change ownership of the myApp directory to the user www-data (a common user account for Apache):

sudo chown -R www-data myApp

Webserver Configuration 

Shared Hosts

If you are deploying to a shared host, it is probably running Apache with .htaccess enabled, so you shouldn’t need to modify anything.

Apache

When you create an app, THT adds an .htaccess file to your public folder.

This tells Apache to route all requests to front.php if the visitor is requests a URL that doesn’t have a corresponding file. In other words, images, etc. will be served as normal, but everything else will be handled by this php file.

Make sure Apache is set up to use .htaccess files. Otherwise, you can move the THT routing directives into the main Apache .conf file.

These modules should also be turned on in the Apache config:

LoadModule deflate_module
LoadModule rewrite_module

Nginx

Coming Soon.

It shouldn’t be too difficult to translate the Apache directives to Nginx.

If you set this up, please let us know what worked. :)

FastCGI

Coming Soon.

If you set this up, please let us know what worked. :)

Deploying Updates 

When updating your app on a remote server, keep in mind that there are some files that you usualy don’t want to overwrite.

• /data folder
• /config/app.local.jcon

(In future updates, we will try to make this process a little easier.)