Hi Fly community,
My name is Peter and I started using Fly a few months ago. While exploring the platform, I noticed there was no easy way to deploy and manage review and production apps similar to how it’s done in Heroku or Vercel. I had to write GitHub Actions workflows to manage this, and while that was fine, doing the same thing for multiple repos quickly became tedious and repetitive. Do you know what the hard part is? Managing secrets for the preview apps. Then I thought to myself, “There has to be a better way to do this”. So I decided to build a platform that makes it effortless to deploy apps to Fly. I called it FlyCD. FlyCD is being designed to handle continuous deployment & delivery, allowing you to concentrate on what you do best: developing excellent software 
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It all started with a simple automation script which I tweeted about. Then the second iteration with some UI was added, and soon after I accepted a few private beta users. And now, I’m happy to announce that the platform is ready for community use.
Here’s a short demo of how it works.
I say it’s still in beta because I have a lot planned for it, and not because it’s unstable. The current features work quite well, and opening it to the public now means you can shape the product through your feedback and support! It currently has minimalist features for a platform of its kind, but I will be adding more features as time goes on.
I implore you to be patient with me as I work to make the platform better for all of us. I’m eager to hear from you, so please leave a comment or email me. If you prefer a video call, you can send me a message with your availability, and I will schedule a call with you.
Current features:
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Preview apps: Deploy preview apps for every pull request on your repo. The preview apps are automatically deleted when the pull request is closed.
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Production apps: Deploy production apps for every push to the main branch of your repo.
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Secrets management: Manage secrets for your apps on the platform. The secrets are automatically injected into your apps when they are deployed.
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Build Logs: View logs for your apps on the platform. The logs are automatically streamed to the platform when your apps are deployed. Retention for logs is 10 days
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Database integration: Integrate your Fly apps with a database. You get a preview database for each preview app, and a production database for each production app.
Current limitations:
It’s currently free to use FlyCD at the moment, and that comes with some limitations to prevent abuse. What are those?
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You can only create a maximum of two projects. If you feel the need for more, let me know I might make an exception for you (if there’s a good reason for it
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When there are multiple users (or projects) deploying changes at the same time, you might experience some delay in the deployment process. This is because I’ve put a throttle on the continuous deployment pipeline to run a certain number of jobs at a time. This is to prevent abuse and to ensure that the platform is available for everyone to use. I will remove this throttle as soon as I can afford to pay for more resources to run the CI servers.
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The documentation will be changing frequently as I add more features to the platform. I will try to keep it up-to-date as much as I can, but if you find any part of it confusing, please let me know. Also, it’s documented on Notion, and it won’t be the final destination for the docs. Over time, it’ll get much better. It’s just me, building this solo for now, so I’m trying to keep things simple and manageable for me while keeping the platform available & stable for all of us to use.
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Database integrations are currently limited to Fly Postgres for now. I will be adding more database integrations soon. If you have any database integration you would like to see, please let me know in the comments.
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No team support for now but I will be adding it soon. If you’re interested in this feature, message me and I will add you to the list of people to notify when it’s ready.
Those are the current limits I can think of at the moment.
If you or your team are eager to sponsor a particular feature, please let me know. I will be happy to work with you to make it happen!
Stories are great, but I know you’re eager to try it out. So here’s a quick guide to getting you started. Access other parts of the documentation here.
You can find me on Twitter @p_mbanugo. I’m also available on Discord @pmbanugo. I’m eager to hear from you.