Trying to deploy a Phoenix app, nothing works, close to giving up

The fly.io service sounds really great on paper for the app I’m building, but so far the experience of actually using it has been absolutely miserable. Everything I try fails for no explainable reason. With errors like this:

And this:

These error messages are not helpful in any way.

And then there is no proper support, only a community forum. If any of you at fly are reading this, this onboarding experience has been absolutely awful. Is this what using Fly is supposed to be like?

Sorry for the trouble! Can you confirm whether this issue is still happening?

We just recently pushed out a fix for this issue. If you are still experiencing any trouble, just let us know.

Seems like I’m making at least some progress. The mysterious errors went away, but now I’m unable to connect to the database due to an error like this:

21:39:03.475 [error] Postgrex.Protocol (#PID<0.136.0>) failed to connect: ** (DBConnection.ConnectionError) tcp connect (efforts-db-prod.internal:5432): non-existing domain - :nxdomain

The database definitely exists. I was able to connect to it using a wireguard tunnel from my local machine.

@Jonas_Nicklas Are you trying to re-launch the same app? If so, given the previous issue I would tear down your previous app/db and start fresh if it’s not too much trouble.

Welcome @Jonas_Nicklas! Sorry for the trouble. That can be so frustrating.

I agree with @shaun that just deleting the Fly app and (and db) then re-creating them is a good idea. Given that it may have failed during the setup of the DB previously.

We’ll get you there!

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BTW @Jonas_Nicklas, you can delete them a couple ways:

fly dashboard

Then Settings > Delete. To delete the DB, nav back to your “apps” and you can find the DB app. Then you can delete that as well.

Or you can do it through command line:

fly apps destroy efforts-api
fly apps destroy efforts-db-prod

Hope that helps!

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I finally managed to get this whole thing deployed, but the process was far from smooth. I had to make a bunch of changes in Phoenix which were not mentioned in either the deploy guide on fly.io nor the phoenix website.