Sample deployments

The Confabulous-maintained instances run on two different stacks. Both configurations are public and you can copy from them.

Fly.io — confabulous.dev (managed)

The free managed instance at confabulous.dev runs on Fly.io, using:

• App + worker as separate Fly processes from a single image.
• Tigris (Fly Object Storage) for S3-compatible session-blob storage.
• Neon as the managed Postgres provider — connection string passed in as DATABASE_URL (a Fly secret).
• Resend for share-invitation email.
• Honeycomb for OpenTelemetry traces.
• Anthropic for Smart Recaps.

The full configuration lives in the repo at fly.toml, with the deploy script at deploy-to-fly.sh.

Notable choices for a Fly.io deployment:

• Two [[vm]] blocks — one for the app process (auto-stop enabled), one for the always-on worker singleton.
• S3_ENDPOINT = "fly.storage.tigris.dev" for Tigris, with S3_USE_SSL = "true".
• Secrets (AWS_*, CSRF_SECRET_KEY, RESEND_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS) are set via fly secrets set, not in fly.toml.
• auto_stop_machines = 'stop' plus min_machines_running = 1 keeps response latency low while letting unused machines stop on idle.

Deploying

# One-time:
fly launch  # or `fly deploy` if the app already exists

# Run database migrations against the production DB, then deploy:
export PRODUCTION_DATABASE_URL='postgresql://user:pass@host/db?sslmode=require'
./deploy-to-fly.sh

Linode — demo.confabulous.dev (demo)

The public demo instance at demo.confabulous.dev runs on a Linode VPS using a Docker Compose stack much like the one in the Deployment walkthrough, with these additions:

• Caddy in front of the app service for HTTPS via Let’s Encrypt.
• Demo mode enabled via [email protected] — see Demo mode.
• Auth: password auth (AUTH_PASSWORD_ENABLED=true) — anonymous visitors are auto-impersonated as the read-only demo user, and the operator signs in as a real account with a password. OAuth is intentionally not configured.

Note

The exact docker-compose.yml and Caddyfile for the demo deployment are not yet published. If you’d like to mirror this configuration, start from the Deployment walkthrough and enable Demo mode — the two together produce the same result.

Picking a stack

If you want…	Use
Managed PaaS, scale-to-zero, minimal ops	Fly.io (or similar — Railway, Render)
Full control of a VM, low monthly cost	Linode VPS (or DigitalOcean, Hetzner) + Docker Compose + Caddy
Enterprise infra, OIDC SSO	Bring your own — k8s, ECS, etc. Confabulous is just a single Docker image plus Postgres + S3.