docs/DEPLOY.md

Deploy — Render (free tier)

This guide walks through deploying youtube_hate_detector to Render using the Blueprint (render.yaml) at the root of the repo. The Blueprint provisions two services: a Dockerised FastAPI backend (signalmod-api) and a static React/Vite frontend (signalmod-ui).

Prerequisites

• A free Render account.
• This repository pushed to GitHub (Render reads the Blueprint from the connected branch).
• Credentials for any external services you plan to use:
  • YOUTUBE_API_KEY — Google Cloud Console → APIs & Services → Credentials.
  • SUPABASE_URL and SUPABASE_KEY — Supabase project settings (optional, only if persistence is enabled).

One-shot deploy (Blueprint)

1. Open the Render dashboard → New → Blueprint.
2. Connect the GitHub account and pick this repository / branch.
3. Render parses render.yaml and shows the two services. Click Apply.
4. Wait for the first build. The API image takes ~5–8 minutes (frontend build + Python deps + spaCy/NLTK data).
5. Once the API is live, open signalmod-api → Environment and fill in the secrets that were declared with sync: false:
   • YOUTUBE_API_KEY
   • SUPABASE_URL
   • SUPABASE_KEY
6. Trigger a manual redeploy so the API picks up the new env vars.

The static site (signalmod-ui) reads VITE_API_BASE_URL at build time and points at https://signalmod-api.onrender.com. If you renamed the API service, update that env var in render.yaml and re-apply the Blueprint.

Important free-tier caveats

• Cold starts. Free web services sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity. The first request after a sleep can take 30–60 seconds while the container restarts and the model warms up. Subsequent requests are fast.
• Memory ceiling: 512 MB. The default production model (Meta-Feature Stacking (Production)) loads BERT and needs roughly 700 MB of RAM, so it will OOM on free. The Blueprint pins MODEL_NAME="LR + TF-IDF (Baseline)", which runs comfortably under the limit. If you upgrade to a paid plan with ≥1 GB RAM, you can switch the env var to the meta-stacking model and rebuild the image with INSTALL_HF=1.
• Build image size. render.yaml builds with the default INSTALL_HF=0 so the Docker image stays small (no torch/transformers). Locally, docker-compose.yml still passes INSTALL_HF=1 for parity with the production model.

Test the Docker image locally before pushing

# Build the same image Render will build (free-tier shape — no HF extras)
docker build --build-arg INSTALL_HF=0 -t signalmod-api:render .

# Run it with the same model the Blueprint will use
docker run --rm -p 8000:8000 \
  -e MODEL_NAME="LR + TF-IDF (Baseline)" \
  -e ENV=production \
  signalmod-api:render

# Health check
curl http://localhost:8000/health

If /health returns 200 OK locally, the same image will boot on Render.