How to use App Platform when all components are in a singe repository

Posted October 10, 2020
DigitalOcean App Platform

I have an app where the API app and front-end app are in subfolders of the project repository because I use Docker Compose when developing. When I tried to add to the App Platform, I received the error that it could not detect how to build and didn’t let me give it any guidance.

Apps Platform seems like exactly what I need for this project, but I don’t like the idea of splitting the project up into 2 repositories (would break Compose, etc.). Can I reorganize my project to make it auto-detectable, or use the App Spec YAML in way that lets me keep my project in one repository?

drewsign

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Steven Normore • October 10, 2020

@drewsign 👋

You can do this today using doctl and a custom app spec, but we don’t expose a way to do it in the UI just yet.

We have a sample monorepo app and spec here: https://github.com/digitalocean/sample-monorepo/blob/main/.do/app.yaml — Notably, the source_dir field on component specs can be used to reference a sub-directory in your repo.

You can submit the spec using: