How to deploy a side project to your own server with Claude
Short one. I had already recorded a video earlier that day, then sat down in the
evening and wanted to finally put StackIt somewhere I could actually play it, so I
recorded that too.
Two things happen here. First I get an actual game UI built on top of the AlphaZero
work from the last few episodes. You pick a board size and a thinking time, then play
against the network, and it draws what the search is considering and what it expects
to happen next. That part surprised me. Watching the percentages move while you think
about your own move is a much better way to understand what MCTS is doing than reading
a training chart.
Then I deploy it. I have a small server that already runs a few of my own projects, so
the job is a systemd service, an nginx entry, and a DNS record. I run one Claude
session in the StackIt repo to write a deploy document, and a second one in my
infrastructure repo to read that document and do the work, while I set up the domain in
Cloudflare in parallel. The DNS part goes wrong for a bit, because I had the Cloudflare
proxy on and the certificate step could not get through. Turning the proxy off fixed it.
Worth saying: this is a small machine running my own hobby projects and the setup is
not hardened. I am not pretending otherwise in the video.
If you want the infrastructure side on its own, say so in the comments and I will make
one about that.
Code is on GitHub: https://github.com/hsperr/StackIt
Chapters
0:00 What we are doing, and asking Claude where we left off
1:20 Committing the AlphaZero work before anything else
2:00 Asking for a real game UI, not the training dashboard
3:40 Fresh rewrite or patch the existing UI
4:20 Playing the network, and seeing what it is considering
6:00 AlphaZero against itself
6:50 Good enough to deploy
7:10 Asking for a deploy document instead of a deploy
8:30 A second Claude session in the infrastructure repo
9:40 Setting up DNS in Cloudflare while it works
10:20 The proxy was the problem
11:00 It is live, and what I would not call secure
Links
Episode 1 (the StackIt bug hunt): • Can AI finish a side project you gave up o...
Episode 2 (building AlphaZero): • Build AlphaZero with AI for your game?
Episode 3 (why it stopped improving): • Why did my AlphaZero stop improving? (debu...
Code on GitHub: https://github.com/hsperr/StackIt
#ClaudeAI #Python #DevOps #SelfHosting #AlphaZero