Deployment

Self-hosting the studio

The studio needs a long-running Node process, PostgreSQL with pgvector, FFmpeg and disk space for output files. One small VM is enough.

bun install --frozen-lockfile
bunx prisma migrate deploy
bun run build
bun run start        # listens on port 3000

• Put it behind a reverse proxy such as Caddy or nginx with HTTPS, and set AUTH_URL to the public address.
• Keep public/videos, public/images and public/audio on persistent disk.
• Run one instance, because the SSE event bus lives in memory.
• Back up the database with pg_dump on a schedule.

Serverless hosts are a poor fit for the studio itself. Generation runs for minutes in the background, FFmpeg needs a native binary, and outputs are written to local disk.

The public site

The landing page and these docs are deployed to Vercel with KALKI_SITE_ONLY=1, which turns every app route into a redirect home, so no database is needed. Vercel deploys every push to main.

Releases

Releases are cut from tags. Bump version in package.json, add a section to CHANGELOG.md, merge, then:

git tag v0.3.0
git push origin v0.3.0

The Release workflow runs the checks and the build, then publishes a GitHub Release with that version's changelog section as its notes.