Fly.io is the new public cloud for running your applications near your users so it can be faster than ever. When you create a new application, you use the fly launch command to give the platform all the information it needs to send it out into the sky. We’ve made steps towards making launching a new app even easier because first impressions matter. Try the new fly launch now; you can have an app up and running in mere minutes.
Previously when you ran fly launch, you got asked a bunch of hopefully relevant questions to help you get your app up and running. We’ve taken a lot of the guesswork out of the process and made it a lot more streamlined. It turns out that even though Fly.io developers use a variety of frameworks, languages, and toolchains you can fold most of them into a few basic infrastructure shapes.
The new launch
Now when you run fly launch, the CLI will infer what you want based on the source code of your application. For example, if you have a Rails app with SQLite, it’ll give you an opinionated set of defaults that you can build from. If you don’t, it’ll give you other options so you can craft the infrastructure you need. I took one of my older applications named douglas-adams-quotes and launched it with the new flow. Here’s what it looks like:
If the settings it guessed are good enough, you can launch it into the cloud. If not, then you’ll be taken to a webpage where you can confirm or change the settings it guessed.
Once you say yes or confirm on the web, your app will get built and deployed (unless you asked it not to with --no-deploy). You’ll get a link to your app so you can go check it out. It’s that easy.
Conclusion
We hope that this can help you look before you fly launch into the wild unknowns of the cloud.
Got any ideas or comments on how we can make this even smoother? Get in touch on our community forum. We’d love to hear from you.