Hosting on Fly.io

Fly.io is an extremely straightforward way to host Slipway, and can often be done for free.

At time of writing Fly had a policy of not charging you anything if your monthly bill comes to below $5¹, which (especially if you use their option to shut down idle servers) it quite likely will for a Slipway server. For my personal Slipway server it costs less than $1/month, which means they don't charge me anything.

Deploying for the First Time

Assuming you have a Slipway server already configured locally, deploying it to Fly.io is trivial.

1. Install the Fly.io CLI

You can find instructions here.

2. Authenticate

If you don't have an account you can sign up through their website or via the CLI:

fly auth signup

Then log in through the CLI:

fly auth login

3. Configure the Fly.io app

Run the fly launch command from your Slipway server root to quickly configure a new Fly.io app.

fly launch

Machine Sizes

Selecting a machine size will depend on your desired performance and the cost. The shared CPU machines are quite slow, but often sufficient. You can change the machine size at any time if your priorities change.

There is a good chance your machines will spend a lot of time shut down, so your costs will likely be much less than what you see on the pricing page (but make sure you test this yourself).

For reference, I've previously run Slipway on the following spec machine, priced (at time of writing) $3.89/month depending on the region:

size = 'shared-cpu-2x'
memory = '512mb'

More recently I've tried more memory (memory = '1gb') to eek out some extra performance when using the JSX renderer (which is written in Javascript, and so not as performant as the WASM renderers).

On this spec my Rig still runs about 3x slower compared to my M3 Macbook Air, but it's sufficient for my needs.

tip

The fly launch command will create a fly.toml configuration file for you. Make sure you have the following properties in your fly.toml so that your machines start and stop automatically, saving you money:

auto_stop_machines = 'stop'
auto_start_machines = true
min_machines_running = 0

4. Configure your secrets

If you require any environment variables, which Slipway doesn't by default, you can use the fly secrets command to deploy these.

tip

If you use 1Password then quite a nice way to manage this is to create a slipway.env file containing references to your secrets stored in 1Password, for example:

GIVENERGY_API_TOKEN=op://slipway/givenergy-cloud/api-token
GIVENERGY_INVERTER_ID=op://slipway/givenergy-cloud/inverter-id
SLIPWAY_SECRET=op://slipway/slipway-self-host/slipway-secret

And then use the 1Password CLI to inject secrets into Fly.io like so:

op inject -i slipway.env | fly secrets import
fly secrets deploy

5. Deploy your app

Once you're set up, you should simply be able to run the following command to deploy your app:

fly deploy

Subsequent Deploys

If you make any changes to your configuration files, simply run fly deploy again to re-deploy.

If you make changes to your secrets, simply repeat the process of using fly secrets to re-deploy the secrets.

Footnotes

1. It is possible this has changed since this article was written, please do your own research. ↩