Volto ships with a nice Makefile to easily get started with commands like "make start" and "make stop" but I find myself needing to unpack what is going on there so I can deploy a project in my company's ecosystem (we are already using systemd to manage the runwsgi/zeoserver processes). This was a really helpful entry: Glossary — Plone Documentation v6. I've used create-react-app before but not for SSR. So from a high level, I take this to mean I would run "make build" which would create static content I want to serve from e.g. Apache, and then have a process manager control whatever this SSR process is. I think it's a razzle command?
It looks like the documentation eschews all of that in favor of setting this up through Ansible Set up your Plone deployment server – Plone deployment — Plone Training 2025 documentation. Is Ansible a hard requirement? To be honest I was hoping for something a little slimmer and not have to adopt all of these devops parts at once. Is my first paragraph outline a bad idea/unfeasible?
Also, as I said I have used create-react-app before but not for SSR. Is what I'm looking for out of scope of Plone and I should be looking at the docs for Razzlejs or something?
Our Deployment documentation is sad. You can also look at Plone 5 docs for possibly helpful, but probably obsolete information. No one has stepped up to fix this situation, and it’s been an open issue for 1.5 years.
Yeah Plone deployment — Plone Training 2025 documentation is what I was looking at but I'm not getting a good picture of what is happening with the 'frontend' part of the site. I've been deploying Plone 6 classic UI sites (and Plone 5 and 4 before that) for some time, so I have a pretty good idea of what is going on in the python ecosystem and the tooling around that. But on the Node side I'm not following.
I guess I want to know what is happening inside the layer "Frontend Volto (SSR)". Like, for "Backend Plone" you might say this is one or more WSGI clients, you can run them with the runwsgi command and a zope.ini config file. I am guessing that for Volto you would say this is a Node app process that you run with maybe some razzle command? Sorry if this doesn't make sense, I'm still trying to contextualize the frontend story here so I'm sure not terribly coherent.
Exactly what I was looking for, I only saw the main deployment section Deployment — Plone Documentation v6. I didn't realize there was a separate Deploying section under the Volto UI section. Thanks!