First deploy failed because of git submodule, now stuck

Questions / Help Build debugging
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1

Hello,

We’re investigating some other platforms right now and I’ve used Fly.io on another project and wanted to see how well it works with this one. However, the first build failed because I think it didn’t checkout the git submodule that is required for our app to work.

But the problem is.. it put our app in a strange state. There is no fly.toml configuration, I can’t try to deploy from the command line because it wants to create a new app. My only option is to try a different commit, which won’t solve the problem.

I also can’t find any information online about what to do to get it to load the submodule properly.

Any guidance here would be helpful to either:

  1. Tell me if there is a configuration to enable submodules
  2. Tell me if we can pull the compiled build from another docker registry instead of building on fly
  3. Tell me if there is a way to modify configuration in this state of pre-first deploy

Thanks!

2

Hi… Were you using the Launch UI? As far as I know, that’s still considered experimental, and I doubt that it supports Git submodules.

In general, you shouldn’t put too much weight on having a particular app name, but you can try fly app delete followed by fly launch --name—and see if that gives the desired result.

If it’s a public registry, then fly deploy --image will work, but you will need the fly.toml first. (That file isn’t really that hard to create by hand, incidentally.)

If it’s a private registry, then you will need to copy it over to registry.fly.io first.

Hope this helps a little!

4

I tend to think of Fly as a Docker platform, notwithstanding attempts to automate this (I assume that’s what @mayailurus refers to).

So your questions don’t seem to me to be the right ones; if you can get it to build in Docker, there’s a good chance it will work in Fly. In other words, there does not need to be a Fly configuration to do stuff with Git or Git submodules, since you can (and should) do that in Docker.

However you mention a compiled build in the context of Docker, so maybe you’re not too far away. Does your app work in Docker locally, including all the submodules-specific stuff?

5

Thanks everyone! Looks like I needed to deploy using the cli since I had to submodules checked out just fine there. It worked great after that.