New in DigitalOcean App Platform: Log forwarding, deployment progress indicators, availability in additional regions and more

Since launching DigitalOcean App Platform last year, we’ve been on an exciting journey of learning from our customers, improving the service and delivering critical features and functionalities that help developers, entrepreneurs and businesses bring their apps to market faster. In August, we released some great features for App Platform such as trusted sources and alerts and monitoring that make your apps more secure and easy to manage. If you missed this Tech Talk, we encourage you to watch it to see these features in action. Today, we’re excited to share more updates that make analysis of your logs simpler and deployment of your apps easier. We’ve also expanded the availability of App Platform to more regions.

Forward App Platform logs to external systems for better analysis

It is critical for application developers to analyze logs to understand how certain events progressed, and see if there were configuration changes or security issues that need to be addressed. Logs are also important for audit trails and troubleshooting issues. Analyzing these logs in a comprehensive and centralized manner helps make the process more efficient as there’s a single platform that gives you visibility into your entire environment. App Platform provides application logging functionality via dashboard and using doctl, which does not include built-in log collection or retention mechanisms. 

We’re excited to announce that App Platform now supports forwarding the application logs to external logging systems so that you can analyze all the events related to your app in a centralized platform and take advantage of log provider capabilities such as search, indexing and retention.The logs that are forwarded are encrypted in flight so that your data is secure and can't be accessed by unauthorized entities.We currently support forwarding logs to Papertrail and Datadog and will be adding support for more log providers in the coming months. This feature is available to all App Platform users and can be configured using the UI or updating the App Spec of your app.

Here’s a quick walkthrough video for setting up log forwarding in App Platform. 

View progress of your app deployment with rich data

In our last update, we introduced the ability to be notified about failed or successful deployments via email or Slack so that you are proactively informed of the status of your app deployment. 

In some scenarios, teams would like to monitor the progress of deployments while the deployment is happening so that they can take immediate actions to troubleshoot or fix issues or even cancel a deployment if they need to make changes to their application while the deployment is going on. We’ve now added new UI elements that show the progress of your deployment in real time with links to get detailed information about your deployment. We’ve also added a “Cancel Deployment” button in case you want to cancel deployment and make changes to your application. 

Deploy a DigitalOcean App Platform app using GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions makes it easier to automate how you build, test and deploy your projects on any platform. You can now deploy a DigitalOcean App Platform app using GitHub Actions, allowing you to auto-deploy your app from source on commit while running tests or performing other operations. Below are some examples of how to use App Platform with GitHub Actions:

https://github.com/digitalocean/app_action

https://github.com/digitalocean/sample-golang-github-action

https://github.com/digitalocean/sample-golang-docr-github-action

Support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)

CORS is used to permit the loading of resources from your app when requesting them from a different domain. CORS uses additional headers to inform a browser whether they’re allowed to make requests to your app or static site when visiting on a different origin. You can now update the CORS policy for any component of your app from App Platform. This is helpful in scenarios where another site or app needs to make requests to your app.

New developer guides and sample apps

With App Platform, we offer the flexibility and support for most common programming languages and frameworks. This means you can develop your app in your language and framework of choice and quickly get it to market using App Platform. We also provide tutorials, best practices guidance and sample apps to help you get started. We’re excited to introduce two new developer guides and sample apps for Go and NodeJS applications. These guides provide step by step guidance for deploying your Go and NodeJS application using App Platform.

Availability in more regions 

We’ve been working on expanding the availability of App Platform so that customers in all regions can take advantage of the service and build, manage and scale apps quickly. We’re excited to announce that App Platform is now available in our London and Toronto datacenters. With this release, the service is now available in all the regions. 

We hope that you are excited about this release and will give App Platform a try. Check out the docs for more information. 

If you’d like to have a conversation about using DigitalOcean App Platform and Managed Databases in your business, please contact our sales team.

Happy coding!

Moises Eskinazi

Senior Product Manager