5 Sharing your apps with the world
This chapter covers
- Options to share your app with users
- Deploying an app to Streamlit Community Cloud for free
- Connecting an app to an external service like an API
- Safeguarding your API keys and other secrets in production
- Managing your app's dependencies
The moment you first successfully run an app you've built from scratch is magical—it's when all the hours spent designing, developing, and refining finally pay off. You've guided it through multiple iterations, squashed bugs, and fine-tuned every feature.
But what's next? Do you keep it hidden away on your local machine? Unless you've built something solely for your own use, the answer is probably no. To make your app truly useful, you need to get it into the hands of your intended audience.
This chapter is about making the leap from local development to global deployment. We'll briefly discuss the various paths you have available for sharing your apps. We'll then settle on one of them and walk through putting your app in production for the world to experience. Along the way, we'll cover key considerations involved in making your app public, such as safeguarding confidential information like API keys and managing your code's dependencies. As always, we'll take a practical approach to all of this, providing you with direct, hands-on experience with everything we discuss.