The SWLA Records platform is a Flask application backed by MySQL on GoDaddy, deployed to Render.com with a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline. This post documents the deployment architecture and the pipeline setup — useful reference for anyone running a similar stack.
Stack overview
How the pipeline works
Every push to the main branch triggers a GitHub Actions workflow that runs
tests and — if they pass — signals Render.com to pull the latest code and redeploy.
Render handles the build, dependency installation, and service restart automatically.
The two database environments (swla_dev and swla_prod) are kept separate via environment
variables injected at runtime, never committed to the repo.
GitHub Actions workflow
Environment variable management
The Flask app reads its database connection from environment variables using a
.env file locally and Render’s environment variable dashboard in production.
The --env flag on the import and linking scripts selects between
swla_dev and swla_prod at runtime, making it safe to
test destructive operations (like a full re-link run) in dev before touching prod.
Render.com cold starts
On Render’s free tier, web services spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity and take 10–30 seconds to wake on the next request. For a research tool with intermittent traffic this is acceptable. The startup screen (“Service waking up…”) is shown to users while the container initializes. Upgrading to a paid Render instance eliminates cold starts if response time becomes a priority.
Python Flask GitHub Actions CI/CD Render.com MySQL SQLAlchemy