Multiple Fly Applications

This guide discusses how to manage multiple Fly applications within a Laravel project. This is useful for Laravel projects that need to run other services, like running a Redis service for queues, cache, and session storage.

What is a Fly application?

Your Laravel application is a Fly application, which means it has the following few things:

• A fly.toml file in the root directory
• A Dockerfile in the root directory that describes the image
• A “server” running on Fly’s infrastructure.

So how do you spin up multiple Fly applications for a single Laravel project?

Creating a Fly application within a Fly application

The important thing about creating multiple Fly applications within a project is keeping them organized. For our example, we’ll setup a Laravel server application and keep it in the ./fly/applications folder within our project repo.

Let’s get started by running the following commands:

# Further reference: https://fly.io/laravel-bytes/full-stack-laravel/
mkdir -p fly/applications/redis
cd fly/applications/redis

From inside the fly/applications/redis folder, run:

fly launch --image flyio/redis:6.2.6 --no-deploy --name my-project-name-redis

This command will create a Dockerfile and fly.toml file that can be further configured for your application’s needs.

Next, we can do some light configuration and then deploy the application:

# Add a required redis password
# (note this means using this password when connecting to Redis from your apps)
fly secrets set REDIS_PASSWORD=mypassword

# Add a volume so deploys of this redis app dont lose data
flyctl volumes create redis_server

# Configure the volume mount in fly.toml
cat <<EOT >> fly.toml
[mounts]
  source      = "redis_server"
  destination = "/data"
EOT

# Deploy it!
fly deploy

Accessing from the root application

Fly creates DNS hosts for each of your applications based on the application name. For this example, we can reach the Redis instance via hostname my-project-name.internal.

Deploying updates

In the future, when it’s time to deploy updates to your Fly application within a Fly application, run:

cd fly/application/redis
fly deploy

That’s it.