Onboarding Customers

After you've released your app, onboard customers by creating deployment groups and sending them setup instructions.

Create a Deployment Group

alien onboard acme-corp

This creates a deployment group called "acme-corp" and returns a deployment token:

Deployment group created: acme-corp
Token: ax_dg_abc123...

Send this to the customer's admin along with your manager URL.

What to Send the Customer

Send the customer's admin three things:

1. Deployment token — ax_dg_abc123...
2. Manager URL — https://manager.example.com
3. Setup instructions — point them to the Customer Admin Reference or include the relevant commands below

What the Customer Does

The customer's admin runs a single command to deploy your software into their environment. After that, updates are automatic.

AWS, GCP, or Azure

alien-deploy up \
  --token ax_dg_abc123... \
  --platform aws \
  --manager-url https://manager.example.com

This:

1. Creates a cross-account IAM role (AWS) or service account (GCP) or managed identity (Azure)
2. Provisions all frozen resources — storage buckets, database tables, queues
3. Deploys all live resources — functions, containers
4. Connects back to your server for automatic updates

The admin's own cloud credentials are used during setup. After that, Alien operates with scoped, least-privilege permissions.

After Setup

Once deployed, the customer can check status or tear down:

alien-deploy status          # check health
alien-deploy down            # tear down everything

Updates flow automatically. Every time you run alien release, new code is deployed to all active customer environments without any admin action.

Verify from Your Side

alien deployments ls

NAME          GROUP       PLATFORM  STATUS    LAST SEEN
acme-prod     acme-corp   aws       healthy   2m ago
acme-staging  acme-corp   aws       healthy   1m ago

Check a specific deployment:

alien deployments get acme-prod

Deployment Groups

A deployment group is a logical collection of deployments for one customer. A single customer might have:

• One production deployment
• A staging deployment
• Regional deployments (US, EU, APAC)

Each deployment in the group shares the same token and configuration but runs independently.

Troubleshooting

Deployment not appearing

• Verify the customer used the correct token and manager URL
• Check that the manager is reachable from the customer's network
• For pull-mode: the agent needs outbound HTTPS to the manager

Deployment stuck in "pending"

• For push-mode: check that the manager has valid cloud credentials
• For pull-mode: verify the agent is running (alien-deploy status)
• Check manager logs for errors

Customer can't reach the manager

• Ensure the manager's base-url in alien-manager.toml matches the public URL
• Check TLS termination — the manager serves HTTP; use a reverse proxy for HTTPS
• Verify firewall rules allow inbound traffic on the manager port