Blog Move from Replit to Fly.io

Yesterday, I moved my blog from Replit to fly.io. Replit was nice because it allowed me to quickly and easily get my blog out into the world. I had been wanting to create my own blog from scratch for a while, and I have been enjoying tweaking it however I like. Unfortunately, Replit doesn't have an API or any facility to create CI/CD pipelines. I listen to the Changelog podcast regularly, and they are always advertising that they use fly.io, so I looked into it and found that it was super easy to get going. This will be my notes on the process.

To get started, at least on a Mac, I followed the quickstart:

brew install flyctl
# or login if you have an account already
fly auth signup  
# configures and tries to launch your app
fly launch

The problem that I immediately ran into was that it misidentified my application as NodeJS because I have a node_modules directory. The tech stack for my blog is Python, FastAPI, HTMX, and Tailspin. The workaround for this problem was to create my own Dockerfile. I'm using uv, and they had instructions for creating a Dockerfile, so I used that. Then it was just a matter of pointing the launch command at the Dockerfile:

fly deploy --dockerfile Dockerfile