Deploying a small app to Fly.io

I wrote a small Todo app using remix-run and a postgres database. I have been deploying my sites to Vercel for a while now and I have been very happy with it. However, I have been noticing that the loading times are a bit slow. I decided to try out Fly.io and see how it compares.

Fly.io

Fly.io is a bit more complicated than Vercel. You have to create a Dockerfile and a fly.toml file. The Dockerfile is pretty simple. It just copies the files from the build directory to the Docker image. The fly.toml file is a bit more complicated. It has a bunch of settings for the app. I had to look up the documentation to figure out what some of the settings did. I also had to figure out how to populate my database with my Prisma schema. I ended up using the fly ssh console command to get a shell on the server and then running npx prisma db push to populate the database. Like below:

fly deploy
fly ssh console -s
--pick instance.  For some reason only the 2nd one worked
then
cd app
npx prisma db push

Vercel

Vercel is so easy. You just push your code to Github and it deploys. You can also deploy from your local machine. I think I can also do this with Fly.io but I haven’t tried it yet. In reality I should probably try to port my large app to Fly.io for a direct comparison but it might be difficult. Although this time around the smaller app was quite easy so perhaps I will try it.