Epic Next.js 15 Tutorial Part 9: Backend Deployment To Strapi Cloud

We have completed all the basic features for our YouTube Summarize AI app, which we have been working on. These include full CRUD functionality, authentication, search, pagination, and AI video summarization. If you still need to complete your project, check out our previous posts in this Epic Next.js 14 tutorial series.

This post will cover how to deploy your project to Strapi Cloud.

Why Strapi Cloud

It is the easiest and hassle-free way to deploy your Strapi CMS projects.

Get Everything You Need to Run Strapi in Production

Here are some items you get out of the box using Strapi Headless CMS Cloud that you don't have to set up yourself.

1. 
   CDN (Content Delivery Network)—This helps deliver content to users more efficiently by caching content on servers located closer to the user.


2. 
   Database - Strapi Cloud includes a database for storing and managing the application data.


3. 
   Email - Strapi Cloud provides email functionality, allowing users to send emails from their applications.


4. 
   File Storage - Strapi Cloud includes file storage capabilities, allowing users to store and manage files associated with their applications.

You also can access real-time logs, share and collaborate on your project with others, and use many other features. you can learn more about Strapi Cloud . The caveat is that when using your own hosting solution, you will be responsible for setting up your own database, file storage, and anything else that is required.

But today, we will take the hassle-free approach and use Strapi Cloud, which offers a FREE 14-day trial.

Preparing Our Project For Deployment

To deploy your project, you just need a GitHub repo with your project. Since you followed this tutorial, you should be ready to go.

Here is the repo of my project.

.

You are going to choose GitHub as your login method.

You should be greeted with the following page. Let's click the Create Project button.

Click the Create my project button to continue.

Now, import your project via GitHub. Click on the button and follow the steps.

Notice I chose my GitHub account PaulBratslavsky and pointed to my repository strapi-5-next-14-project-deploy.

Let's continue by completing the steps in the Setup section.

I will keep the default node version, and since we don't have any environment variables, I will click on the Create project button.

You should see the following screen.

Once your project finishes deploying, you should see the following screen. You can continue your project by clicking the Visit app button.

Once the process is finished, you will be greeted with the Create Admin user screen.

Congratulations, you have deployed your very first Strapi project.

How To Transfer Our Local Data To Our Cloud Instance

As a bonus, let's examine how we can transfer local Strapi data to seed our new cloud instance.

Let's start by logging into Strapi cloud, going to our deployed application, and logging in.

In your Strapi admin panel, click on the Visit App button. This will take you to your deployed app.

Enter your credentials to log in.

Navigate to Settings => Transfer Tokens and click the Add new Transfer Token button.

To transfer our data, we will use the Strapi CLI Transfer command.

Ensure you are in your backend folder and run the following command to see all the helpful options.

yarn strapi help transfer

You should see the following output.

$ strapi help transfer

Usage: strapi transfer [options]



Transfer data from one source to another



Options:

  --from <sourceURL>                      URL of the remote Strapi instance to get data from

  --from-token <token>                    Transfer token for the remote Strapi source

  --to <destinationURL>                   URL of the remote Strapi instance to send data to

  --to-token <token>                      Transfer token for the remote Strapi destination

  --force                                 Automatically answer "yes" to all prompts, including

                                          potentially destructive requests, and run

                                          non-interactively.

  --exclude <comma-separated data types>  Exclude data using comma-separated types. Available types:

                                          content,files,config

  --only <command-separated data types>   Include only these types of data (plus schemas). Available

                                          types: content,files,config

  -h, --help                              display help for command

✨  Done in 2.16s.

➜  backend git:(main) 

We will use the transfer --to command to point to our Strapi cloud instance.

In my case, it is https://clever-dawn-ec1866942d.strapiapp.com/admin Notice I am including the admin portion of the url.

To start the transfer, I will type the following in my terminal: You will need to use your URL and Token, which we just generated.

We will keep this open because we need our project's url and token for the next step.

Nice. We just seeded our initial data into our Cloud App.

In the next blog post, we will deploy our front end to for our daily "open office hours" from 12:30 PM CST to 1:30 PM CST.