Deploying Your Application to Fly.io

In this chapter, we’ll learn how to deploy our task manager application to Fly.io, one of the most popular cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers, where we’ll make it publicly available to the rest of the world. We’ll start by learning about Fly.io and why it’s a good choice for deploying our application. Then, we’ll study how to configure and build our project to be able to deploy it to Fly.io. Finally, we’ll learn how to deploy the application along with its required services, and we’ll test that everything works as expected.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to deploy applications to Fly.io and make them available to the rest of the world. Being able to deploy your application to multiple platforms will give you flexibility and the ability to choose from multiple options when it comes to publishing your applications on the internet.

We will be covering the following topics...

Technical requirements

You will need the latest Java JDK LTS version (at the time of writing, this is Java 17). In this book, we will be using Fedora Linux, but you can use Windows or macOS as well.

You will need the latest Node.js LTS version (at the time of writing, this is 16.15).

You will need a working Docker environment to create a container image. There are Docker packages available for most Linux distributions. If you are on a Windows or macOS machine, you can install Docker Desktop.

You can download the full source code for this chapter from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Full-Stack-Quarkus-and-React/tree/main/chapter-13.

Introducing Fly.io

In Chapter 12, Deploying Your Application to Kubernetes, we learned how to containerize our application and deploy it to Kubernetes. In this case, we leveraged a local Minikube Kubernetes cluster since getting access to a public Kubernetes cluster might be difficult or expensive for you. Knowing how to deploy the application to Kubernetes is a valuable asset considering it’s becoming the standard cloud platform these days. However, unless you used a public cluster instead of Minikube, so far, your application can only be consumed from your local machine.

In this chapter, we’ll learn how to deploy the application to Fly.io, a new cloud PaaS provider that is becoming very popular thanks to its free plans. The main reason for choosing this platform is that it offers a free plan suitable for our application’s needs. By the end of this chapter, our application will be publicly exposed and accessible from anywhere in the world.

Fly.io is a platform...

Configuring the project for Fly.io

When it comes to deployment options, Fly.io is a flexible platform that offers multiple alternatives. There are integrations with several programming languages and frameworks, and quick start guides with detailed documentation on how to deploy applications based on each of these technologies. Most of these choices involve Fly.io performing a container image build from your application or project sources. In addition, there’s also the possibility to deploy a pre-built container image that is publicly available in Docker Hub. This is the most appropriate choice for our application’s requirements since it is based on multiple programming languages and none of the Fly.io suggested approaches would work for us.

In the Pushing the container image to Docker Hub section of Chapter 12, Deploying Your Application to Kubernetes, we pushed a container image of the task manager packaged for JVM mode to Docker Hub. You might be wondering, why not...

Deploying the task manager

The main requirement to perform any operation in Fly.io is having its command-line interface (CLI) tool, flyctl, installed and available in your path. The installation process is straightforward and involves running just one or two commands in your operating system’s terminal. You can find instructions for your specific platform at https://fly.io/docs/hands-on/install-flyctl/. Now, let’s use this tool to create a new account or to log in to our existing account.

Creating a Fly.io account

There are several ways to create a Fly.io account. However, since we already have its CLI tool available, we’ll use it for this purpose. The process is straightforward; the only requirement is having a valid email account. We can create a new account by running the following command:

flyctl auth signup

The command will open a new browser window where you should fill in your details:

Figure 13.2 – A screenshot of...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to deploy our task manager application to Fly.io. We started by learning about Fly.io, and why its free plan and its specific features make it a very good choice for deploying our application. Then, we learned how to configure our project to build and push a container image to Docker Hub specially tuned for Fly.io. Finally, we deployed the application and made sure everything worked as expected.

You should now be able to deploy applications to Fly.io and, most importantly, be able to share them with the rest of the world by exposing them on the internet. In the next chapter, we’ll learn how to create a continuous integration (CI) pipeline for our application.

Questions

1. What’s one advantage of Fly.io compared to other PaaS providers?
2. How can you override the configured database URL when running a Quarkus native application?
3. Does Eclipse JKube support Dockerfiles?
4. Where does flyctl read the app configuration from?
5. Can you deploy existing container images to Fly.io?