Aaron Kelly's Blog

While reading a post on hacker news I discovered a fantastic new service - fly.io!

Here’s their description of themselves:

We’re Fly.io. We take container images and run them on our hardware around the world. It’s pretty neat, and you should check it out; with an already-working Docker container, you can be up and running on Fly in well under 10 minutes.

Imagine deploying a Dockerfile from your terminal to the cloud and have it running in seconds. Too frickin’ cool!

Even if you don’t have an app to deploy yet, you can deploy a pre-built docker image from a docker registry e.g. [hub.docker.com](https://hub.docker.com/].

trying it out

I have my own api, and it has a Dockerfile to build it:

FROM python:alpine
RUN pip3 install \\
	boto3 \\
	flask \\
	pytest \\
	requests
COPY . /app
WORKDIR app
ENTRYPOINT \[ "flask" \]
CMD \[ "run", "--host", "0.0.0.0" \]

After installing flyctl, I authenticated it (it waits for you to then sign-in via your web browser):

$ flyctl auth login
Waiting for session...Done
Successfully logged in as **aaronkelly@fastmail.com**

I then ran this command inside my git repo:

$ flyctl init
Update available 0.0.163 -> 0.0.207
Update with flyctl version update

? App Name (leave blank to use an auto-generated name) aaronkelly-api

Automatically selected personal organization: Aaron Kelly

? Select builder: Dockerfile
	(Do not set a builder and use the existing Dockerfile)
? Select Internal Port: 5000
New app created
  Name         = aaronkelly-api  
  Organization = personal        
  Version      = 0               
  Status       =                 
  Hostname     = <empty>         

App will initially deploy to lhr (London, United Kingdom) region

Wrote config file fly.toml

All that command did was create a fly.toml file:

$ cat fly.toml
# fly.toml file generated for aaronkelly-fly on 2021-04-10T11:24:42+01:00

app = "aaronkelly-api"

kill_signal = "SIGINT"
kill_timeout = 5

[[services]]
  internal_port = 5000
  protocol = "tcp"

  [services.concurrency]
	hard_limit = 25
	soft_limit = 20

  [[services.ports]]
	handlers = ["http"]
	port = "80"

  [[services.ports]]
	handlers = ["tls", "http"]
	port = "443"

  [[services.tcp_checks]]
	grace_period = "1s"
	interval = "15s"
	port = "8080"
	restart_limit = 6
	timeout = "2s

And I was able to deploy it with flyctl deploy:

$  flyctl deploy
Update available 0.0.163 -> 0.0.207
Update with flyctl version update

Deploying aaronkelly-api
==> Validating App Configuration
--> Validating App Configuration done
Services
TCP 80 ⇢ 5000 

Deploy source directory '/home/aaron/src/api'
Docker daemon available, performing local build...
==> Building with Dockerfile
Using Dockerfile Builder: /home/aaron/src/api/Dockerfile
Step 1/6 : FROM python:alpine
 ---> ef8f54a83dcd
Step 2/6 : RUN pip3 install     boto3   flask   pytest  requests
 ---> Using cache
 ---> c1c2bf3e1968
Step 3/6 : COPY . /app
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 29dfc594c18a
Step 4/6 : WORKDIR app
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 400567e30a0c
Step 5/6 : ENTRYPOINT [ "flask" ]
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 2f0e33149159
Step 6/6 : CMD [ "run", "--host", "0.0.0.0" ]
 ---> Using cache
 ---> cb367cfaa12d
Successfully built cb367cfaa12d
Successfully tagged registry.fly.io/aaronkelly-api:deployment-1618050757
--> Building with Dockerfile done
Image: registry.fly.io/aaronkelly-api:deployment-1618050757
Image size: 130 MB
==> Pushing Image
The push refers to repository [registry.fly.io/aaronkelly-api]
dd7f9666f400: Layer already exists 
650ae75897db: Layer already exists 
81a33fccb669: Layer already exists 
84880d4f10be: Layer already exists 
9f044ae41f8b: Layer already exists 
f65ae8cf3a00: Layer already exists 
8ea3b23f387b: Layer already exists 
deployment-1618050757: digest: sha256:78dbaee8405b27636ef6f95e50d8a909c72112535186a1a1fa83de0bb882e9b8 size: 1790
--> Done Pushing Image
==> Creating Release
Release v0 created
Deploying to : aaronkelly-api.fly.dev

Monitoring Deployment
You can detach the terminal anytime without stopping the deployment

1 desired, 1 placed, 1 healthy, 0 unhealthy [health checks: 1 total, 1 passing]
--> v7 deployed successfully

I was able to reach my app immediately:

$ curl aaronkelly-api.fly.dev     

### welcome to my api!
endpoints:
/cloud      cloud functions
/dotfiles:  public dotfiles function

My API doesn’t have a nice web frontend, but you could try deploying your own webapp or one of the popular images from https://hub.docker.com/.

Once its deployed, all you need to do then is run flyctl open, and the app will open in your browser.

running pre-built images on fly.io (e.g. from hub.docker.com)

should be as easy as this:

flyctl launch --image $NAME

phoenix liveview

there is some love affair between fly.io and [[Phoenix Liveview]]