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Develop & Deploy Apps

On this page

  • Overview
  • What is an App Services App?
  • How are Apps Deployed?
  • App Administration Tools
  • Automate Deployment
  • Deployment History

An App Services App is a collection of managed services that run your application's backend operations on MongoDB Atlas. You configure the App's services using declarative configuration files and write JavaScript code to implement custom behavior.

An App sits between your application's frontend client and your data stored in MongoDB Atlas. Apps have built-in tools for modeling and working with data in Atlas, including role-based access permissions and document schema validation. You can use these to power services like Device Sync, Triggers, and the Data API.

To learn how to create an App, see Create an App.

Apps use a "serverless" architecture, which means that you as the developer don't directly manage or think about the servers that run your App. Instead, you deploy your App to a one or more cloud regions around the world. Your services run on-demand on servers in that region managed by MongoDB Atlas.

To learn more, see Deployment Models & Regions.

App Services includes several tools that you can use to create, configure, and deploy Apps. You can accomplish most administration tasks using any of these tools, so choose the tool that best suits your development workflow.

The following administration tools are available:

  • App Services UI: A browser-based GUI that's available within MongoDB Atlas. You can use it to develop and manage your Apps with rich editors and forms.

  • App Services CLI: A command-line interface that you can access from a terminal or shell script. The CLI lets you work directly with your App's configuration files in a local environment or CI/CD pipeline.

  • App Services Admin API: A REST-ful API that you can access using any standard HTTPS client. You can use the Admin API to integrate App Services with automation tools like CI/CD pipelines.

Tip

Many pages in this documentation include tabs that let you choose a specific admin tool. Make sure to look out for these tabs and to choose your preferred tool.

You can use the App Services admin tools on an ad hoc basis to manually develop and deploy changes. Alternatively, you can automate the deployment process. This is particularly useful for Apps with testing and staging environments or that are developed by teams.

There are two approaches to automatic deployment:

  • App Services GitHub Integration: The built-in GitHub integration lets you link your App to a GitHub repository and automatically syncs your deployed App with configuration files stored in the repo. To learn more, see Deploy Automatically with GitHub.

  • Custom Automation Workflows: You can create, modify, and delete Apps in your own CI/CD pipelines using a code-first admin tool like the App Services CLI or Admin API. To learn more, see Set Up a CI/CD Pipeline.

App Services logs every deployment of an application and stores a list of the 25 most recent deployments. You can export or rollback to any version stored in the deployment history.

You can access the deployment history for an App from the Deployment screen in the App Services UI or by calling the List recent deployments Admin API endpoint.

The table of application deployment history logs in the App Services UI
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