Render

One-Click Deploy

The fastest way to get Spree running on Render:

This creates all required services automatically:

• Web — Rails app serving the API and admin panel
• Worker — Sidekiq for background jobs
• PostgreSQL — database
• Redis — caching, jobs, Action Cable

The database is seeded on first deploy. Your store is ready in a few minutes.

Prerequisites

• Render account with a credit card on file
• GitHub account

Custom Deployment

If you need to customize the backend (add gems, models, etc.), start from the Spree Starter template:

1. Go to spree/spree-starter and click Use this template > Create a new repository

2. Clone your new repository and make your changes

3. In the Render dashboard, click New > Blueprint and select your repository

4. Render reads the render.yaml from your repo and creates all services. Review and click Deploy Blueprint.

The included render.yaml handles:

• Build: bundle install, asset precompilation, db:prepare, db:seed
• Web: Puma with health check on /up
• Worker: Sidekiq with shared SECRET_KEY_BASE
• PostgreSQL 18 and Redis

After Deployment

Admin Dashboard

Access your admin panel at:

https://<your-app-name>.onrender.com/admin

Default credentials are created during db:seed. Change them immediately after first login.

Environment Variables

Render sets DATABASE_URL, REDIS_URL, and SECRET_KEY_BASE automatically from the blueprint. For additional configuration (SMTP, file storage, Sentry, etc.), see Environment Variables.

Production Sizing

The free/starter plans work for trying Spree. For production workloads, we recommend:

To enable auto-scaling, add this to the web service in your render.yaml:

- type: web
  name: spree
  plan: pro
  scaling:
    minInstances: 2
    maxInstances: 3
    targetMemoryPercent: 80
    targetCPUPercent: 80

Next Steps

Render provides ephemeral storage — uploaded files (product images, etc.) won't persist across deploys. Set up cloud storage:

• Asset Storage (Amazon S3 / Cloudflare R2)

Before going to production:

• Set environment variables (SMTP, SSL, etc.)
• Configure CDN
• Configure caching