Let’s start with a link: Cookbooks · Fly Docs
Now for background.
It has been nearly three weeks since I started Preparations for Rails 7.1, and progress towards getting pull requests merged has been excruciatingly slow. So I spent some time writing documentation. Not knowing whether there would be any take up by the Rails team, I wrote the docs targeting multiple audiences:
- People who are entirely new to Dockerfiles, whether or not they are targeting Rails or even Fly.io.
- People who inherited or were provided with a Dockerfile for an existing application that doesn’t quite meet their needs and need to see a working example that supports their additional requirement, one that can be harvested and merged into their existing docker file.
- And to the Rails core team, an menu of changes that I’m offering to adapt and make to the Rails dockerfile template. Let’s discuss as I everybody would benefit from Rails providing a great starting point.
These templates are a formalization of something I have been doing for some time now. When a problem is reported on this community forum I will often spin up an application that incorporates key characteristics of the problem being described and explore it myself using fly ssh console and test out changes to the Dockerfile and redeploy.
It is my hope that others see the value in exploring alternate paths in deployment with throwaway VMs. Perhaps some will contribute back to these cookbooks. Or build their own cookbooks for other frameworks and other providers.
Having more people literate on how to write Dockerfiles would be a good thing.