Are Squash URLs accessible to users outside my organization?

By default yes, and you can also change this to restrict their visibility only to your organization members.

How can I reduce the build & startup time of my deployments?

Please go to How to reduce the build & startup times of my app.

How can I connect to a Squash instance through SSH?

Please go to SSH Access for more details.

How can I manage development databases (pre-seeded dbs)?

See Pre-seeded databases (dev dbs).

Does Squash manipulate the HTTP requests of my application in any way?

Squash does not aim to manipulate your application responses in order to avoid any different behavior you would experience compared to a production environment. That being said, there are a few exceptions listed below that won't affect your application functionality.

• Squash HTTP headers. We add a few addition headers that can be useful in some scenarios where you might want to detect from your application if the environment where it's deployed is actually Squash.
• Deployment activity tracking. We inject a tiny bit of CSS and Javascript on each application response in order to properly track the deployment activity used by the auto shutdown policies and notification of code changes. This small bit of code is always inserted at the very bottom of the page, it's fully isolated and doesn't affect your application URL schema. The assets are served from the domain system.squash.io.

Are there any restrictions on deployment time?

By default deployments will automatically shut down after 1 hour of inactivity. However, you can adjust these settings in your account to fit your needs.

What YAML Version Can I Use in the .squash.yml file?

YAML 1.1 and prior versions.

Do I lose my data after a deployment is shut down?

By default the storage on Squash deployments is destroyed when a deployment is decommissioned. However, you can enable the persistent storage feature to keep your data intact between runs.

502 Bad Gateway right after my deployment build is finished

There are many reasons on why you might encounter this error. The most common cause is a web server starting sooner than the application itself. For instance, you might be using Nginx as a web server in front of a Django or Flask application running with Gunicorn. When you start your docker containers Nginx might start up before the Gunicorn process. Squash will start sending requests to the Docker container and will receive a 502 response, since Nginx can’t communicate with the Gunicorn app just yet.

It will usually take from a few seconds to a few minutes for the Gunicorn process to finish starting up. Squash in this case will automatically detect the successful response and will properly start routing the requests to the Docker container’s application.

You can use the backend_wait setting to avoid this issue. This will tell Squash to wait a bit more for internal application services to be completed ready.

504 Gateway timeout

You will encounter this error when the application takes too long to return a successful HTTP response. You can increase the time Squash waits for a success response by using the ready_wait setting in the .squash.yml file.