Hey there! 👋

If you have more than 1 server and a need to deploy multiple applications 'somewhere' on that cluster without having to micromanage - don't reinvent the wheel, just use Kubernetes. It's the industry standard for a reason, and you're not going to have a hard time finding help when you need it.

However, it's easy to forget that there's a class of service/business where this doesn't make sense. Many small businesses (if they're not using a PaaS like Fly), don't have the resources to run a Kubernetes cluster and 95% of the time, just need an app to run on a single VPS.

I've been playing with Fly.io a lot recently (see my series on deploying Wagtail to Fly.io).

One of the neat things that has come out of Fly is a renewed interest across the dev world in SQLite - an embedded database that doesn't need any special servers or delicate configuration.

Some part of this interest comes from the thought that if you had an SQLite database that sat right next to your application, in the same VM, with no network latency, that's probably going to be pretty quick and pretty easy to deploy.

I've been playing with Fly.io quite a bit recently.

Yes I'm drawn to the exciting tech, the fascinating blog posts, the attractive pricing and generous free tier (for now...), but more importantly, Fly are one of the few new breed 'PaaS' tools that realise what Heroku got right with its excellent developer experience, and are on a fast-track to replicating and eventually exceeding what Heroku offers.

While Fly is quickly establishing itself as my go-to hosting platform for personal/hobby projects (even before the "sunsetting" of Heroku's free tier), Wagtail has been my go-to platform for almost all the sites I build for quite a while.

To kick everything off, you'll need a Wagtail site configured in a local development environment. The Wagtail Getting Started guide is a great place to start.

Alternatively, grab a checkout of bakerydemo, or find your own existing project.

We'll start by getting your application in to a state where it is easily configurable with environment variables.

For Fly to know how to run our application, we need to package it up in a way that it understands. We need to tell it things like:

• How to acquire all our project's dependencies
• What application server to use and how to configure it
• What files need to be made available to the platform

Fly currently supports 3 ways of doing this; Dockerfiles, Buildpacks and Nixpacks. The latter two are a great way to get started if you're not familiar with Docker - they provide a pre-built way for the platform to build and run your application without the developer having to do much extra work.

With all that prep work done we can finally do what we said we'd do at the start - deploy a site to Fly.io.

To start, we'll need to install the Fly command line tool, flyctl. Follow steps 1-3 over on the Fly.io docs and then come back. I'll wait.