Deploying Strapi with PostgreSQL and using S3

Strapi is an open-source headless CMS solution to create and manage your own APIs. Strapi is used to manage dynamic content with multiple contributors and can power your websites, blogs and applications.

In this guide, you will learn how to set up a new Strapi v4 deployment. Configuration data will be stored in a PostgreSQL database and media uploads will use your own Amazon S3 bucket.

If you don't want to manage an S3 bucket or would like to keep everything self contained, you can set up Strapi with volumes by following this guide.

1. Create a new bucket in your Amazon S3 and an IAM user that will be used for uploading to this bucket. The minimum required policy for your bucket is:

   "Action": [
     "s3:PutObject",
     "s3:GetObject",
     "s3:ListBucket",
     "s3:DeleteObject",
     "s3:PutObjectAcl"
   ],

2. Create a new PostgreSQL database. For increased security, keep SSL enabled and External Access disabled. You can start with the smallest compute plan with 4 GB of storage and one replica.

   • Later, when you need to access the database in your local environment and run Strapi from your machine, you can use northflank forward in the Northflank CLI to forward the database for local development without enabling external access.

3. Create a new secret group which will store the environment variables. We will manually add S3 connection details and link the database we created earlier.

   Manual Secrets

   Key	Value
   AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	Your AWS user’s access key
   AWS_ACCESS_SECRET	Your AWS user’s access secret
   AWS_REGION	Bucket region, for example us-east or eu-west-2
   AWS_BUCKET	Bucket name, for example strapi-media
   APP_KEYS	String of two or more comma separated values
   JWT_SECRET	String of 64 characters

   • Click on the key icon to use a built-in random key generator to generate long and secure strings.

   Inherited environment variables from the database

   Variable name	Alias
   HOST	DATABASE_HOST
   PORT	DATABASE_PORT
   TLS_ENABLED	DATABASE_SSL
   DATABASE	DATABASE_NAME
   USERNAME	DATABASE_USERNAME
   PASSWORD	DATABASE_PASSWORD

   

   • Inheriting environment variables ensures that the database connection details are automatically injected in the environment, avoiding the need to manually copy and paste them.

   • To learn more about connection details inheritance, read our changelog post.

4. Open our template repository and click Use this template to create a new repository in your account. Our template repository has S3 upload pre-configured and you don’t have to edit any files.

5. Create a new combined service and select your repository as the source. Select Buildpack under build options and leave default heroku/buildpacks:20. Port 8080 will be automatically detected and exposed. You can start with the smallest resource plan nf-compute-10.

Once the build succeeds and container boots up, visit the service URL to create your first administrator account.

It may take a few minutes for Strapi to set everything up, view the container logs to see progress of the startup.