Step 6 — Fly.io one-line deploy

Fly.io feels like Heroku's successor. Just a Dockerfile, no AWS-shape complexity.

First deploy

curl -L https://fly.io/install.sh | sh
fly auth login
fly launch    # interactive setup, generates fly.toml
fly deploy

Done. https://my-app.fly.dev with auto HTTPS.

fly.toml

app = "my-app"
primary_region = "nrt"

[http_service]
  internal_port = 3000
  force_https = true
  auto_stop_machines = "stop"
  auto_start_machines = true
  min_machines_running = 0

[[vm]]
  cpu_kind = "shared"
  cpus = 1
  memory_mb = 256

auto_stop_machines = "stop" saves money during quiet periods.

Database

fly postgres create --name my-db
fly postgres attach -a my-app my-db

DATABASE_URL is auto-injected.

AWS vs Fly.io

Aspect	AWS	Fly.io
Learning curve	steep	flat
Time to first deploy	1+ hour	5 min
Cost (small)	$50+	$5+
Cost (large)	cheap	pricey
Control	full	limited

Side projects → Fly.io. Real ops → AWS.

Useful commands

fly logs
fly status
fly secrets set KEY=v
fly ssh console
fly scale count 2

Try it

Deploy a small Next.js or FastAPI app. fly apps destroy when done.

Going deeper

• Fly.io
• Deploy options

Next

Final step 7 — single-server philosophy.