Deployment URLs

Gigadrive Network generates three kinds of URL for an application, all of them under gigadrive.app. Two move as you deploy, and one is pinned to a single deployment forever.

The three URLs

my-app is the application's label. It is assigned from the application slug on the first deployment, and you can change it afterwards.

The branch URL appears the first time you deploy a branch and re-points on every later deployment of it. Branches covers how a branch maps to deployments. The production URL re-points when a deployment to the production environment goes live, which is what makes a rollback take effect at the address your users already have, and Environments covers how an application's environments are arranged.

The per-deployment URL never moves. Its suffix is an eight-character id of lowercase letters and digits, and it stays bound to that one deployment long after production has moved past it. That is the URL to paste into a pull request or a bug report. Very old deployments that stopped receiving traffic eventually lose their static assets to retention, though their Functions keep responding; Deployment retention covers when that happens.

Choose your production label

1. Open the application's domain settings

   In the console, open the application, then Settings, then Domains. The Production hostname card holds the label and shows the .gigadrive.app suffix beside it.

2. Enter a label

   Availability is checked as you type. Every hostname is unique across the whole platform, so a label another organization already holds is unavailable to you.

3. Save

   Whatever you type is normalized server-side, so My App is saved as my-app.

If the application has no active production deployment, the label is reserved rather than live and the URL starts serving after your next production deployment.

Renaming carries the branch URLs with it. Set the label to checkout and my-app-git-main.gigadrive.app becomes checkout-git-main.gigadrive.app in the same operation. The old hostnames are released the moment you save, so anything still pointing at them stops resolving, and another application can take the name.

Label rules

The dot rule is a consequence of the certificate: *.gigadrive.app covers one level, so api.my-app.gigadrive.app would fail its TLS handshake. SSL certificates covers the rest.

Set the production label from code

There is no CLI command for hostnames. Both API surfaces check availability first, then claim the label.

import { GigadriveClient } from '@gigadrive/sdk';

// Credentials are read from GIGADRIVE_CLIENT_ID and GIGADRIVE_CLIENT_SECRET.
const client = new GigadriveClient();

const applicationId = '0197b2f1-2f4a-7a0b-8a2d-222222222222';

const { available, reason } = await client.applications.checkHostnameAvailability(applicationId, 'my-app');

if (!available) {
  throw new Error(`Label unavailable: ${reason ?? 'no reason given'}`);
}

const { hostname, live } = await client.applications.setProductionHostname(applicationId, 'my-app');

console.log(live ? `Live at https://${hostname}` : `Reserved ${hostname}, deploy to production to go live`);