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Quick Start: Deploying to Fly.io

Overview

Support for Fly.io is in a very preliminary phase. For example, it will likely fail if you already have a Django project deployed on Fly.io. django-simple-deploy should only be used on test projects at this point.

Deployment to Fly.io can be fully automated, but the configuration-only approach is recommended. This allows you to review the changes that are made to your project before committing them and making the initial push. The fully automated approach configures your project, commits these changes, and pushes the project to Fly.io's servers.

Prerequisites

Deployment to Fly.io requires three things:

  • You must be using Git to track your project.
  • You need to have a requirements.txt file at the root of your project.
  • The Fly.io CLI must be installed on your system.

Configuration-only deployment

First, install django-simple-deploy, and add simple_deploy to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py:

$ pip install django-simple-deploy
# Add "simple_deploy" to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py.
$ git commit -am "Added simple_deploy to INSTALLED_APPS."

Now create a new Fly.io app using the CLI, and run simple_deploy to configure your app:

Note

The fly and flyctl commands are used on the Fly.io docs interchangeably, we will be using fly here.

$ fly apps create --generate-name
$ python manage.py simple_deploy --platform fly_io

simple_deploy will create a database and link it to the app you just created. It will then configure your project for deployment. At this point, you should review the changes that were made to your project. Running git status will show you which files were modified, and which files were created for a successful deployment.

If you want to continue with the deployment process, commit these changes and run the deploy command. When deployment is complete, use the open command to see the deployed version of your project:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Configured for deployment to Fly.io."
$ fly deploy
$ fly open

You can find a record of the deployment process in simple_deploy_logs. It contains most of the output you saw when running simple_deploy.

Automated deployment

If you want, you can automate this entire process. This involves just three steps:

$ pip install django-simple-deploy
# Add `simple_deploy` to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py.
$ python manage.py simple_deploy --platform fly_io --automate-all

You should see a bunch of output as Fly.io resources are created for you, your project is configured for deployment, and simple_deploy pushes your project to Fly.io's servers. When everything's complete, your project should open in a new browser tab.

Pushing further changes

After the initial deployment, you're almost certainly going to make further changes to your project. When you've updated your project and it works locally, you can commit these changes and push your project again, without using simple_deploy:

$ git status
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Updated project."
$ fly deploy

Running management commands

To run management commands such as migrate against the deployed project, use the ssh command to log into a console on the remote server:

$ fly ssh console

Troubleshooting

If deployment does not work, please feel free to open an issue. Please share the OS you're using locally, and the specific error message or unexpected behavior you saw. If the project you're deploying is hosted in a public repository, please share that as well.

Please remember that django-simple-deploy is in a preliminary state. That said, I'd love to know the specific issues people are running into so we can reach a 1.0 state in a reasonable time frame.