Installation on Render

Any questions, problems or suggestions with this guide? Ask a question in our community or contribute the change yourself at https://gitlab.com/baserow/baserow/-/tree/develop/docs .

Render is a modern alternative to Heroku, a platform as a service. Render enables you to build, run and operate applications entirely in the cloud. We have created a template that allows you to easily install Baserow on the “Standard” paid plan and the paid Postgres plan provided by Render.

The template

Currently, we only support running Baserow on the $25 per month “Standard” Render plan additionally with their $7 per month Postgres plan for performance reasons.

Deploy to Render The button above can be used to install Baserow on Render with one click. You may need to manually enter the https://gitlab.com/baserow/baserow/ repository URL and choose the branch master.

After installation, you can reach Baserow on the URL provided by Render.

Built-in Baserow templates disabled by default

In our template because we are only using 1 Baserow worker the initial template sync will block other background tasks, such as exporting tables. As a result we have by default disabled the loading of our built-in example templates. You can trigger this manually by:

  1. Login Render and go to your Baserow web-service
  2. Click the “Shell” sidebar link
  3. Enter and run the following command ./baserow.sh backend-cmd manage sync_templates

Every time you upgrade your Render Baserow app you will need to repeat the steps above the get the latest Baserow templates.

Persistent S3 file storage

By default, the uploaded files are stored inside the Render service for demo purposes. This means that everytime your render service restarts, you will lose all your uploaded files. Your files can optionally be stored inside an S3 bucket. To do so, you need to add a couple of config vars to the settings. Go to your Baserow web-service in Render and click on the “Environment” section. Here you need to add the following vars:

  • AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: The access key for your AWS account.
  • AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: The secret key for your AWS account.
  • AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME: Your Amazon Web Services storage bucket name.
  • AWS_S3_REGION_NAME Optional: Name of the AWS S3 region to use (eg. eu-west-1)
  • AWS_S3_ENDPOINT_URL Optional: Custom S3 URL to use when connecting to S3, including scheme.
  • AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN Optional: Your custom domain where the files can be downloaded from.

Non AWS S3 providers

It is also possible to use non AWS, S3 providers like for example Digital Ocean. Below you will find example settings if you want to connect to Digital Ocean Spaces.

Workers per service

To spare resources, every Baserow service in Render has only one worker by default. If you are upgrading to a more powerful Render plan, you can increase the amount of workers to 2. This can be done via the Environment section on your Baserow web-service in Render. Find the “BASEROW_AMOUNT_OF_WORKERS” var and set the value to your desired number of workers.

You can roughly estimate the amount of workers based on the available RAM of your service type. Every worker needs around 512MB ram.

Updating to the latest version of Baserow

When a new version of Baserow has been released, you probably want to update. To do so on your render Baserow web-service you can click the “Manual Deploy” button and select " Deploy latest commit".

Installation on Heroku Installation on Cloudron