I Deployed My Go Backend to a Real VPS. Here's Exactly What Happened.

In Part 14 , I finished HMAC webhook signing. The backend was complete — JWT auth, PostgreSQL, Redis caching, rate limiting, circuit breaker, worker pool, webhook delivery, migrations, Docker. All running locally. But "runs on my machine" isn't a portfolio project. It's a homework assignment. Time to ship it. The Stack Being Deployed Go backend — ~15MB Docker image (multi-stage build, CGO_ENABLED=0) PostgreSQL 16 — with golang-migrate running schema migrations on startup Redis — for caching, rate limiting, and refresh token storage Oracle Cloud Free Tier — 1GB RAM, 45GB disk, already provisioned Everything wired together with docker-compose.yml . One command to start the entire stack. Step 1: The VM Was Fine, Actually I was worried about the free tier specs. Turned out the "1GB" in the tier name refers to RAM, not disk. The actual disk is 45GB — plenty. free -h # 954MB RAM, 552MB available df -h # 45GB disk, 41GB free The real constraint: no swap . Go's compiler is memory-hungry. Without swap, building the Docker image on the VM would exhaust RAM and kill the process. More on this in a moment. Step 2: Install Docker curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sudo sh sudo usermod -aG docker ubuntu newgrp docker The official install script handles everything — Docker Engine, containerd, Docker Compose plugin. One command, done. Step 3: Clone the Repo The repo is private. Created a fine-grained GitHub personal access token with Contents: Read-only permission. Used it to clone: git clone https://TOKEN@github.com/absep98/Go_learn.git Security note: never paste tokens in chat, email, or anywhere visible. Type them directly into the terminal. Tokens in chat history are compromised tokens. Step 4: Create the .env File The .env from my local machine needed two changes for Docker: # LOCAL (wrong for Docker): DB_HOST = localhost REDIS_HOST = localhost # DOCKER (correct): DB_HOST = postgres # ← service name in docker-compose.yml REDIS_HOST = redis # ← service name in docker-compose.ym