Post Deployment

Once you have your Laravel application up and running in Fly.io, it helps to know how to execute commands on it and review events happening in your application.

Console Access

To interact with your Laravel application in Fly.io, you can ssh into a running instance through the Fly SSH Console:

fly ssh console

Connecting to top1.nearest.of.frosty-glitter-7650.internal... complete
# 

Once you gain access to your application’s console, you can run commands like you would in your local environment, like listing your Laravel folder structure:

cd /var/www/html
ls -l

Dockerfile  artisan        composer.lock  docker             package.json       public     storage             vendor
README.md   bootstrap      config         lang               phpunit.xml        resources  tailwind.config.js  vite.config.js
app         composer.json  database       package-lock.json  postcss.config.js  routes     tests

Logs

Hopefully you have configured some neat, helpful logs to keep track of the events happening in your Laravel application. So another way to inspect what your application’s been up to, is to check its application logs. There are several options:

Fly.io’s logging service

By default, Fly.io updates Laravel’s logging channel to "stderr" through the [env] configuration found in fly.toml:

[env]
  APP_ENV = "production"
  LOG_CHANNEL = "stderr"
  LOG_LEVEL = "info"
  LOG_STDERR_FORMATTER = "Monolog\\Formatter\\JsonFormatter"

This "stderr" configuration prints your application logs into the console, where the Fly.io service is able to listen and capture logs from.

In order to view your logs captured by the Fly.io service, you can either:

1. Visit your application’s monitoring section from your Fly.io dashboard like so: "https://fly.io/apps/<app-name>/monitoring"
2. Or run the flyctl logs command:

fly logs

2022-09-23T12:05:07Z app[8ebaa037] ams [info]{"message":"reached test","context":{},"level":200,"level_name":"INFO","channel":"production","datetime":"2022-09-23T12:05:07.200105+00:00","extra":{}}

Volumed Log File

Laravel Log File

If you would like to persist your application logs for a longer duration, you can instead opt to save the logs in a log file by configuring "single", "daily", or "stack" as the LOG_CHANNEL.

So update your fly.toml:

[env]
  APP_ENV = "production"
  LOG_CHANNEL = "stack"
  LOG_LEVEL = "info"
  LOG_STDERR_FORMATTER = "Monolog\\Formatter\\JsonFormatter"

If you’ve opted to configure "stack" as your LOG_CHANNEL make sure its channels configuration found in config/logging.php includes "single" or "daily":

 'stack' => [
    'driver' => 'stack',
    'channels' => ['single'],
    'ignore_exceptions' => false,
  ],

Note: You can even add "stderr" in the stack’s channels list to view your logs through Fly.io.

Adding Volume

Deployment wipes out all log files! In order to persist your Laravel log files, you’ll need to add a volume to persist your log folder’s state.

1) First let’s create a Volume:

fly volumes create my_log_vol --region ams --size 10 #GB

• You can replace the volume name my_log_vol with any name of your preference.
• You can specify your region code through the –region attribute
• You can specify your volume’s size in GB through the –size attribute

2) Revise fly.toml to mount that volume in your /var/www/html/storage/logs folder:

[mounts]
  source="my_log_vol"
  destination="/var/www/html/storage/logs"

3) Finally, deploy the changes!

fly deploy