Request: Rename App

It would be awesome if we could rename apps from their auto generated names :slight_smile:

14 Likes

Your request is noted. It’s something that we can’t do at the moment.

That said you could do this at your own risk

Make an empty directory
run flyctl init in there
enter your desired name
Set the builder to None
Make sure you select the same organization

This will write out a fly.toml file
In there should be app="your desired name"
make a note…

Go back to the original app
edit fly.toml
make a note of the original generated app name
replace that name with your desired name in the app="" line
save

and then run flyctl deploy

And the app will go live - your old app is still running

What won’t be copied across - 1: your secrets, 2: your certs. You’ll have to recreate them. And your app will have new IP addresses.

But you’ll have your desired application name.

Oh and once everything on the new name is working, don’t forget to flyctl destroy originalappname

2 Likes

Thanks for that detailed solution.

Just an idea, could there be a higher level abstraction like a nickname that can be used in the GUI and toml?

5 Likes

@danwetherald that’s a good suggestion that we’ll look into

3 Likes

Any updates?

2 Likes

+1 on this issue as well, currently trying out the service for the first time by following the guides hands-on as well as getting started with node and got confused at first due to this.

  • I was renaming the app in the fly.toml and re-running flyctl deploy but Fly.io already registered the name (noted the app as inactive). So the command returns Error not possible to validate configuration: server returned Could not resolve App
  • I tried re-running flyctl launch thinking it would register a new app with the manually specified name but the fly.toml file gets overwritten (even after ticking the option to reuse the information in the file)

One more vote for this issue! It would be great if we could rename an app !

2 Likes

+1

1 Like

+1

it’s hard to name things correctly on the first go

2 Likes

I would just like the ability to give an app a nickname for display purposes in the Dashboard. When you have several apps it’s difficult to tell which is which just from the random name.

2 Likes

The fly dashboard could at least prefer the custom domain name over the automatically generated app name. This is the way Netlify does it: if you have a custom domain attached to your app than it will be shown instead of the randomly generated title in the list of apps. The original app name still applies to configuration files etc, while the custom domain name is used as the app’s display name in dashboard.

It does not solve the problem fully but at least gives a relief.

The ideal solution would be to be able to freely assign the app’s display name or to use the tags.

Nickname would be great, and honestly description too – I can tell this dashboard is quickly going to become hard to navigate by these hardcoded names alone.

3 Likes

Even though this request to be able to rename an application name is pretty old now, I was exactly looking for this feature. From my point of view, it is definitely a handy feature.

1 Like

Especially because time from time machines are going rogue and the only way to do fix the situation is to recreate an app

Can you post here (or a separate topic) about what a “machine going rogue” means?

I’ve emailed all the details to the support, but in a nutshell: our app is stuck with a failed deployment and is still running even though I destroyed the machine.