Deploying a FastAPI application on FastAPI Cloud

Introduction

FastAPI is used by developers all around the world to make production grade APIs. It provides a fast and type safe developer experience. In this blog, I’ll guide you to deploying your FastAPI application on FastAPI Cloud, a new cloud platform by the same team behind FastAPI.

FastAPI Cloud

FastAPI Cloud is designed to be the default deployment platform for FastAPI applications. It’s deeply integrated and specifically made for FastAPI apps. Some features that FastAPI provides by default are:

• Zero Downtime Deployments
• Secure by default with HTTPS certificates
• Custom Domains
• CI/CD Integration with GitHub for automatic deployments

Now, let’s set up a FastAPI project that we will build and deploy. Before that, make sure you have created an account on FastAPI Cloud.

Setting up the Project

Let’s start scaffolding a basic FastAPI project to deploy. I’ll be using the uv package manager to manage the project. If you want me to write an article on it, let me know in the comments.

uvx fastapi-new myapp
cd myapp

This will automatically create a default FastAPI project. You can now run the local development server with

uv run fastapi dev

Deploying the Project

Authorize the CLI application to your FastAPI Cloud account with

uv run fastapi login

Then run

uv run fastapi deploy

This asks questions like the name of your application, location of the project configuration file pyproject.toml among others. It then starts the deployment process to FastAPI. After the deployment is complete, it will print the domain your application is deployed at to stdout. Visit the domain and see your application deployed.

Envrionment Variables and Secrets

You can add the required environment variables from both the CLI and your account dashboard. To add them from the CLI,

Environment Variables

uv run fastapi cloud env set ENVIRONMENT "prod"

Secrets

Use the --secret flag to ensure that the secrets are encrypted and cannot be viewed from the web dashboard.

uv run fastapi cloud env set --secret SESSION_SECRET "your-session-secret"

You can also import a .env file in the dashboard to not have to enter all secrets one by one. Whatever you prefer.

Setting up git integration

You may also connect the GitHub repository of your application to your deployment. This makes it such that whenever you push a commit, your application is automatically redeployed with the latest commit. This is my preferred way as I only have to push my code once to GitHub and FastAPI Cloud automatically pulls my code from there and deploys it. It also keeps the application up to date with local development.

Adding a custom domain

You can also add a custom domain for your application from the FastAPI dashboard.

Integrations

FastAPI Cloud also has integrations with Neon, Redis Cloud and Supabase so that you can easily add a database to your FastAPI application.

Conclusion

FastAPI Cloud is still in beta and therefore, many things are still not currently defined. If you already have your applications deployed elsewhere, you may want to keep them there till it becomes more stable and production ready. If you are starting a new project from scratch or you have any hobby projects, then FastAPI Cloud is arguably one of the easiest places to deploy them to production. I hope this guide was helpful for you and you can now deploy your FastAPI applications easily and securely.

Thanks for reading. Goodbye.