Launch an App on Fly

Fly.io allows you to deploy any kind of app as long as it is packaged in a Docker image. That also means you can just deploy a Docker image and as it happens we have one ready to go in flyio/hellofly:latest.

Each Fly.io application needs a fly.toml file to tell the system how we'd like to deploy it. That file can be automatically generated with the flyctl launch command.

flyctl launch --image flyio/hellofly:latest

? Select organization: Personal (personal)

Organizations: Organizations are a way of sharing applications and resources between Fly.io users. Every Fly.io account has a personal organization, called personal, which is only visible to your account. Let's select that for this guide.

? Select region: ord (Chicago, Illinois (US))

Next, you'll be prompted to select a region to deploy in. The closest region to you is selected by default. You can use this or change to another region.

You will also be prompted for credit card payment information, required for charges outside the free allowances on Fly.io. See Pricing for more details.

At this point, flyctl creates an app for you and writes your configuration to a fly.toml file. The fly.toml file now contains a default configuration for deploying your app.


app = "hellofly"


[build]
  image = "flyio/hellofly:latest"


[[services]]
  internal_port = 8080


...

The flyctl command will always refer to this file in the current directory if it exists, specifically for the app name value at the start. That name will be used to identify the application on the Fly.io platform. You can also see how the app will be built and that internal port setting. The rest of the file contains settings to be applied to the application when it deploys.

We'll have more details about these properties as we progress, but for now, it's enough to say that they mostly configure which ports the application will be visible on.

Next: Deploying Your App

We are now ready to deploy our containerized app. At the command line, just run:

flyctl deploy

This will look up our fly.toml file, and get the app name hellofly from there. Then flyctl will start the process of deploying our application to the Fly.io platform. flyctl will return you to the command line when it's done.

Next: Check your app's status