# 1. Find your service name

Many commands and configurations need the exact name of your service. You can find it in the Zerops Dashboard.

• Open your project in the Zerops Dashboard.
• In the project overview, find the service you want to manage.
• Use this exact name whenever a command or pipeline configuration asks for <service-name>.

# 2. Configure deployment pipeline

Go to Service Settings > Pipelines & CI/CD Settings in the Zerops Dashboard and connect your repository.

For production, use a trigger on new tags. This keeps deployments intentional and tied to a specific version. You can also add a regex filter, such as ^v[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+$, if you want to allow only semantic version tags.

Alternatively, add zcli push to your existing CI/CD pipeline if you want full control over when deployments happen.

Learn more about pipeline triggers: https://docs.zerops.io/features/pipeline

# 3. Deploy to production

Create and push a new Git tag to deploy a specific version of your app:

git tag -a v1.0.0 -m "Release version 1.0.0"
git push origin v1.0.0

# 4. Configure high availability

Review the autoscaling settings in Service Settings > Automatic Scaling Configuration in the Zerops Dashboard.

For high availability, make sure your service runs at least two containers:

minContainers: 2
maxContainers: 6
verticalAutoscaling:
  cpuMode: DEDICATED
  minRam: 2
  minFreeRamGB: 0.5
  minFreeRamPercent: 20

In HA mode, each container runs on a different physical server. A load balancer distributes traffic across healthy instances.

Because of this setup, your application should be stateless. Avoid local file storage for sessions or user uploads. Use external stores such as Redis or Valkey instead.

# 5. Set up your domain

To send real traffic to your app, configure public HTTP access in Service Settings > Public Access & Internal Ports in the Zerops Dashboard.

Add your custom domain and point your DNS records to the Zerops IPs shown in the dashboard:

Type   Name          Content          TTL
A      example.com   <zerops-ipv4>    Auto
AAAA   example.com   <project-ipv6>   Auto

Check the public access documentation for full details, including wildcard domain configuration:

https://docs.zerops.io/features/access

Once everything works, you can disable the Zerops subdomain so all traffic goes through your custom domain.

# 🎉 You are good to go!

Your application is live in production and the core setup is complete.

The following sections are optional. They cover extra production features such as observability, backups, and diagnostic access. You can stop here and come back later when you need them.

# 6. Set up observability (Optional)

Forward logs and metrics to external services or self-hosted tools from Project Settings > Log Forwarding & Logs Overview in the Zerops Dashboard.

Zerops supports log forwarding to services such as Better Stack, Papertrail, and self-hosted ELK stacks.

For metrics, you can use the Prometheus and Grafana recipes available in the Zerops recipe marketplace. These can help you monitor PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and other services.

Learn more about log forwarding: https://docs.zerops.io/references/logging

# 7. Configure database backups (Optional)

Manage automated encrypted backups in Service Settings > Backups in the Zerops Dashboard.

For HA production, consider increasing backup frequency and testing restore procedures regularly.

HA database services on Zerops run as primary-replica clusters. Backups are taken from replicas, which helps reduce performance impact on the primary database.

Before a major deployment or migration, create a manual protected backup:

zcli backup create <db-service> --tags pre-deploy,protected

Read the backup documentation for more options:

https://docs.zerops.io/features/backup

# 8. Set up diagnostic access (Optional)

Use zCLI and VPN access when you need to inspect or maintain production services directly.

For runtime services:

zcli vpn up
ssh <service-name>.zerops

For HA services with multiple containers, you can connect to specific instances. Find the full DNS names for individual containers in Service Settings > Service Containers & Overview in the Zerops Dashboard.

For databases, connect through the VPN to reach the project’s private network, or set up secure direct IP access for your database admin tools.

Check the VPN documentation: https://docs.zerops.io/references/cli/commands#vpn-up