This guide will show you how to deploy your ShipThing API as a dedicated service. This can be useful if you want to run your API and frontend on different platforms or if you want youc API to be a “long-running” service instead of a serverless deployment. You probably want to use this if you have tasks in your backend that have a long execution duration (that would exceed the timeout limit of a serverless deployment for example). This guide explains how to deploy your ShipThing API as a standalone service. As Hono has multiple deployment options (e.g. Deno, Bun, this guide will focus primarily on the Node.js deployment.

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Create a dedicated app for your API

The good news is that our api directory is independent. If your current api directory is /apps/web/api, you can copy its code to /apps/api If you are using the standard next.js api route, you need to refer to hono to migrate to hono. You can find an example in the /apps/api directory. Next, add the following files into the apps/api directory:
apps/api/index.ts
import { serve } from '@hono/node-server';
import { log } from '@repo/observability/log';
import app from './server/api';

const port = Number.parseInt(process.env.PORT || '3002');

// deploy as a standalone Node.js server
serve(
  {
    fetch: app.fetch,
    port,
  },
  () => {
    log.info(`Server is running on port ${port}`);
  }
);

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Add rewrite rule to web app

The API will be running on a different URL than the app. To not have to handle cross-origin requests, we are going to proxy the API requests through the web app. To do this, you need to add a rewrite rule to your web app:
/packages/next-config/index.ts
	async rewrites() {
		return [
			{
				source: "/api/:path((?!search$).*)",
				destination: `${process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL ?? "http://localhost:3002"}/api/:path*`,
			},
		];
	},
We are redirecting all requests to the /api path to the API service, except for the /api/search path. This is because the docs search is a serverless function inside our web app and we don’t want to proxy it through the API service.Now you should be able to run the API service locally, by running the known pnpm dev command inside your monorepo. It will start both apps in development mode.To keep the repository clean, you can also remove the /apps/web/app/api/[[...rest]] folder, as it is no longer needed.

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Deploy API service

You can basically deploy your API as any other Node.js project. We will quickly go through the two most popular options: Node.js and Docker.

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Deploy as Node.js server

PaaS providers like Vercel, Heroku, or Netlify allow you to deploy your Node.js app with a few clicks. You can follow our dedicated guides for the most popular providers. Every process is similar, and will contains a few crucial steps:
  1. Connecting your repository to the PaaS provider
  2. Setting up build settings (e.g. build command, output directory)
  3. Setting up environment variables
  4. Deploying the project
Terminal
# Build the API service
pnpm --filter api start
 
# Start the API service
pnpm --filter api build

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Deploy as Docker container

Deploying your API as a Docker container is a good option if you want to have more control over the deployment process. You can follow our docker dedicated guide to learn how to deploy your API as a Docker container. For the API application, the Dockerfile will be located in the apps/api directory To make Prisma work in the Docker container, you need to set the engine type to binary in the schema.prisma file:
schema.prisma
generator client {
  provider = "prisma-client-js"
  engineType = "binary"
}
That’s it! You can now grow your API layer as a standalone service, separated from other apps in your project, and deploy it anywhere you want.