first vps — is ssh in and docker compose up -d really the whole deploy Compose

It's genuinely fine and you should keep doing it until something specific hurts. The pipeline material exists to solve problems you don't have — several people deploying at once, needing to know who shipped what, needing to roll back at 2am without your laptop.

Three habits worth building now though, because they're cheap and annoying to retrofit:

• put the deploy in a script in the repo, even if it's three lines. Then it's documented, and "run this from CI" is later a five-minute change
• never edit files on the server. Everything comes from git. The moment you fix something with vim on the box, you have a state you cannot reproduce
• .env on the server, never in the image, and write down somewhere which keys it needs

That's it. Blue-green at nine users is cosplay.

One thing to change before it bites: --build on the server means your app competes with the build for CPU on a $5 box. Fine at nine users. The day it isn't, it shows up as timeouts during deploys and it's confusing.

Also do backups now rather than later. Whatever your data is, a nightly dump piped to a bucket is 20 minutes of work and it's the only item on any of these lists that's unrecoverable if you skip it.

What you're doing has a name, it's just called deployment. Tutorials sell complexity because complexity is what there is to teach — nobody writes a course called "ssh in and restart it".

The one thing I'd add at your size is knowing how to get back. Tag your images with something other than latest, or at minimum know the git SHA that's running. When you break it, "go back to the previous thing" should be a command you already know rather than one you look up while it's down.

Add a firewall today if there isn't one. ufw allowing 22, 80 and 443 and denying everything else, and check postgres isn't published. The number of compose files with ports: - "5432:5432" reachable from the open internet is genuinely alarming, and scanners find them within hours.

Staging is the one people skip that's actually cheap. Not a whole second environment — a second compose project on the same box with different ports and its own database. Ten minutes. Then you can try a scary migration somewhere other than the thing your friends are using.

you'll know it's time for CI the first time you try to deploy from a train on a phone hotspot and it dies halfway. that's the actual trigger for most people