This is good feedback.
First, you can find this:
A “container exit code” would help enormously here.
If you run fly status --all, you’ll see a list of active and recently stopped/failed VMs. fly vm status <id> will show you exit codes.
I have a general goal of running a single (non-interactive) program to operate an entire set of apps that work together to provide some service. This program is for both creating ephemeral environments to develop/test against and deploying to the production environment when it’s time for that.
The fly apps platform is not designed for multi service apps. Fly Machines should get us closer, but they’re very low level.
If you’re up for doing a bunch of dirty work, you can get close to what you want with the Machines Terraform provider.
Right now, we’re a pretty good place to run a monolith close to your users. I think more advanced deployment is a ways off.
I haven’t shown this to anyone yet, but we’re working on anti-roadmap. One thing you’ll see on there is “Heroku Pipelines Alternative”, which is a portion of what you’re describing.
We think the best way to solve this is to have company to solve this with us (like we’re doing with Upstash for Redis).
If there are companies doing what you’re looking for, send them my way!
I appreciate you struggling through this a few times. You’ve probably put more energy into this than we deserve. 