# Deployment

Deploying a **FastAPI** application is relatively easy.

## What Does Deployment Mean

To **deploy** an application means to perform the necessary steps to make it **available to the users**.

For a **web API**, it normally involves putting it in a **remote machine**, with a **server program** that provides good performance, stability, etc, so that your **users** can **access** the application efficiently and without interruptions or problems.

# Lifespan Events

You can define logic (code) that should be executed before the application **starts up**. This means that this code will be executed **once**, **before** the application **starts receiving requests**.

The same way, you can define logic (code) that should be executed when the application is **shutting down**. In this case, this code will be executed **once**, **after** having handled possibly **many requests**.

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<img src="/img/tutorial/separate-openapi-schemas/image02.png">
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This means that it will **always have a value**, it's just that sometimes the value could be `None` (or `null` in JSON).

    Before setting `convert_underscores` to `False`, bear in mind that some HTTP proxies and servers disallow the usage of headers with underscores.

## Duplicate headers

It is possible to receive duplicate headers. That means, the same header with multiple values.

You can define those cases using a list in the type declaration.

You will receive all the values from the duplicate header as a Python `list`.

```

### Raise an `HTTPException` in your code

`HTTPException` is a normal Python exception with additional data relevant for APIs.

Because it's a Python exception, you don't `return` it, you `raise` it.

These environment variables can only handle text strings, as they are external to Python and have to be compatible with other programs and the rest of the system (and even with different operating systems, as Linux, Windows, macOS).

That means that any value read in Python from an environment variable will be a `str`, and any conversion to a different type or validation has to be done in code.

## Pydantic `Settings`

You will be able to return a database model and it will read the data from it.

#### Technical Details about ORM mode

SQLAlchemy and many others are by default "lazy loading".

That means, for example, that they don't fetch the data for relationships from the database unless you try to access the attribute that would contain that data.

For example, accessing the attribute `items`:

```Python

You should never save plaintext passwords, so, we'll use the (fake) password hashing system.

If the passwords don't match, we return the same error.

#### Password hashing

"Hashing" means: converting some content (a password in this case) into a sequence of bytes (just a string) that looks like gibberish.

Whenever you pass exactly the same content (exactly the same password) you get exactly the same gibberish.

`secrets.compare_digest()` needs to take `bytes` or a `str` that only contains ASCII characters (the ones in English), this means it wouldn't work with characters like `á`, as in `Sebastián`.

To handle that, we first convert the `username` and `password` to `bytes` encoding them with UTF-8.

Then, for the request in the next tab, your app will wait for one second less, and so on.

This means that it will end up finishing some of the last tabs' requests earlier than some of the previous ones.