What's your Fly tool story?

1

We’re looking for your tool story, how you use flyctl in your daily, weekly or whenever deployments.

  • Do you build locally or remotely?
  • Do you use builtin builders, Docker files, or buildpacks? Which ones?
  • How do you orchestrate your builds?
  • What tools do you use alongside flyctl? CI/CD, scanners?
  • And what would make Flyctl better for you (in general terms, not specific features)

Inquiring minds want to know!

Dj

2

Use flyctl to deploy, usually few times an hour.

Build locally, remote builds are cool, but they seem pretty slow and feels weird and insecure to have something copy files to a remote server. I’m sure there are options to control what gets copied but I can’t be bothered maintaining that. Also scared I might send something I don’t want to.

Use the builtin CNB Tiny, writing mostly Go apps. Works great… I don’t even have a Dockerfile, get a 40MB container that loads super fast. I’m sure I can get it down smaller with scratch, but not worth the effort.

No build orchestration, I just run it locally. First automation is going to be Github Actions.

Orthogonal tooling is linting and building, mostly on Github Actions.

What would make Fly better, in general, would be increased speed and reliability. It still feels like a small team running it, which is a positive for consulting, support and help – but not for business building and mission critical work. It needs to give off a lot more rock solid vibes, which is happening slowly.

3

I usually build remote since I don’t really need Docker for local dev (I can just do node index.js). It probably takes a bit longer but it’s ok. It won’t make much of a difference for me to deploy in say 20 vs 40 seconds.

I’m still using Docker files but will transition to the Node buildpack at some point.

And what would make Flyctl better for you (in general terms, not specific features)

The biggest thing I’m missing is being able to manage multiple environments (dev, prod, etc). I’m still in development so that’s not a big deal for now… but I have no idea how I’m going to manage multiple Fly apps on the same project folder.

I’ve read (I think in this forum) you can omit the app name from the fly.toml but then you have to add it to every command. You can’t just simply do flyctl logs anymore. Firebase allows you to configure multiple apps on the same config file and then do something like firebase use app-name so that all future commands apply to that app.