Getting Started with Rackline

In this tutorial

Introduction

Rackline makes cloud hosting effortless. In this tutorial you will create an account, spin up your first droplet, and get familiar with the dashboard so you can start deploying applications within minutes.

Prerequisites

• A valid email address
• A payment method (credit card or PayPal)

Step 1 — Create Your Account

Head to rackline.com and click Get Started. Fill in your email, choose a strong password, and verify your email address. Once verified, you will be prompted to add a payment method. Rackline offers a generous free tier with 1 shared CPU droplet, 512 MB RAM, and 10 GB SSD storage — no charge for the first 30 days.

# Install the Rackline CLI (requires Node 22+)
npm install -g @rackline/cli@latest

# Authenticate
rackline auth login

Step 2 — Provision Your First Droplet

A droplet is a virtual machine running on Rackline infrastructure. You can provision one from the dashboard or the CLI. Choose a region closest to your users for the lowest latency. Rackline supports 12 regions worldwide including US East, US West, EU Central, and AP Southeast.

# Create a droplet with the CLI
rackline resources create droplet \
  --name my-first-droplet \
  --region us-east-1 \
  --size s-1vcpu-1gb \
  --image ubuntu-24.04

# Check the status
rackline resources list droplets

Step 3 — Explore the Dashboard

The Rackline dashboard is your command center. The overview page shows all active resources, current billing, and system health at a glance. The left sidebar lets you navigate between Droplets, Databases, Networking, Monitoring, and Settings. Each droplet detail page includes real-time CPU, memory, disk, and bandwidth graphs updated every 30 seconds.

# SSH into your droplet
rackline ssh my-first-droplet

# View resource metrics from the CLI
rackline monitor my-first-droplet --interval 5s

Step 4 — Deploy a Quick Test App

Let us verify everything works by deploying a simple static page. Create an index.html file locally and use the Rackline CLI to push it to your droplet. The CLI handles SSH key exchange and file transfer automatically.

# Create a simple HTML file
echo '<h1>Hello from Rackline</h1>' > index.html

# Deploy to your droplet
rackline deploy --target my-first-droplet --source . --port 80

# Open in browser
rackline open my-first-droplet

Conclusion

You now have a Rackline account, a running droplet, and your first deployed page. From here you can explore more advanced tutorials like deploying a Next.js app, setting up a PostgreSQL database, or configuring CI/CD with GitHub Actions.