Creating a custom cloud platform brings powerful advantages—cost savings, full control, data sovereignty, and, crucially, the ability to make your solution self-hostable. By using DigitalOcean's affordable infrastructure, you can save thousands per month compared to AWS Lambda, Vercel, Cloudflare, or similar providers.

This repository leverages Spore-drive to deploy Tau, an open-source PaaS/IDP, all through code. Read the full guide in this article.

1. Install Dependencies
   Run the following command to install the necessary packages:

   npm install

2. Set Environment Variables
   Configure your DigitalOcean API token and project name:

   export DIGITALOCEAN_API_TOKEN="<your DigitalOcean token>"
   export DIGITALOCEAN_PROJECT_NAME="<your project name>"

   Note: This setup will deploy across all droplets within your specified project.

   If you use Namecheap for domain management, enable automatic DNS updates by providing these variables:

   export NAMECHEAP_API_KEY="<your Namecheap API key>"
   export NAMECHEAP_IP="<your IP address>"
   export NAMECHEAP_USERNAME="<your Namecheap username>"

3. Deploy
   Finally, deploy your platform with:

   npm run displace