Deploying Rebase on Fly.io

Fly.io runs Docker containers close to your users on a global anycast network, and is highly configurable about where data lives — a good fit for a Rebase deployment with a strict European focus. Fly has data centers in Amsterdam (ams), Frankfurt (fra), Madrid (mad) and Paris (cdg).

Nothing on this page is Fly-specific about your project. A Rebase deployment is two separable pieces — the published runtime image, and the bundle that rebase build produces — and the same bundle runs under Docker Compose on a laptop, on Rebase Cloud, under the Helm chart and here.

1. Initialize the Fly app

With flyctl installed, from your project:

fly launch --no-deploy

1. App name: my-rebase-app
2. Organization: personal, or your corporate org.
3. Region: choose a European datacenter — Frankfurt (fra) or Paris (cdg).
4. Database: say Yes to a Postgres cluster. Fly creates it in the same region and injects DATABASE_URL.
5. Redis: say No.

--no-deploy because the secrets and the bundle have to be in place first.

If your collections declare a vector property, enable the extension once against that database: CREATE EXTENSION vector;.

2. Build the bundle and point fly.toml at the runtime image

There is no application image to build from your source. rebase build produces a dist-bundle directory with your compiled collections, functions, crons and — if your project declares a static app — your built frontend:

rebase build

Commit a three-line Dockerfile at the project root:

FROM rebasepro/server:0.24.0
COPY dist-bundle /bundle

And point fly.toml at it:

app = "my-rebase-app"
primary_region = "fra"

[build]
  dockerfile = "Dockerfile"

[env]
  NODE_ENV = "production"
  DISABLE_SELF_REGISTRATION = "true"

[http_service]
  internal_port = 8080          # the port the runtime image listens on
  force_https = true
  auto_stop_machines = true
  auto_start_machines = true
  min_machines_running = 1      # realtime subscriptions need a machine to stay up

[[http_service.checks]]
  path = "/livez"

/livez rather than /health: the second performs a database round-trip, so a liveness check on it restarts a healthy machine during a brief database hiccup.

DISABLE_SELF_REGISTRATION is new: on 0.17.3 there is no such switch, and the first account to register becomes the administrator.

Upgrading Rebase later is a change to that FROM line. Your bundle is untouched.

3. Set production secrets

fly secrets set \
  JWT_SECRET=your_super_long_randomly_generated_secure_string \
  REBASE_SERVICE_KEY=another_super_long_randomly_generated_secure_string \
  CORS_ORIGINS=https://my-rebase-app.fly.dev \
  FRONTEND_URL=https://my-rebase-app.fly.dev \
  REBASE_ADMIN_EMAIL=you@example.com \
  REBASE_ADMIN_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand -hex 12) \
  -a my-rebase-app

The last two are new, and are how this app gets an administrator at all: in production the first account to register is not promoted, so nothing else produces the first signed-in caller. Set them before the first deploy serves traffic — see Your first admin. fly secrets list shows only digests, so keep the generated password from this command; there is no way to read it back.

4. Deploy

fly deploy

Then fly open.

5. The schema

The runtime creates missing tables at boot, including your collections’. REBASE_MIGRATE_ON_BOOT defaults to ensure, which is additive across the whole schema — it creates missing tables, columns and enum types and applies their row-level security — so the first start against an empty database comes up serving your collections.

What ensure never does is change something that already exists: it does not alter a column type, drop anything, or edit an existing enum’s labels, because a machine restarting must not reshape a schema as a side effect of a deploy.

One thing therefore still needs the CLI, run from a checkout or a CI job:

rebase db push

Any change that is not purely additive — a renamed column, a narrowed type, a removed field.

For a private Fly Postgres, open a tunnel with fly proxy 5432 -a <your-db-app> and point DATABASE_URL at localhost:5432. The runtime image ships without the CLI, so this never runs inside the machine and a release_command cannot call it either. For versioned migrations, commit migration files with rebase db generate and run rebase db migrate as a release step instead.

File storage

A Fly machine’s filesystem does not survive a deploy, so local file storage is silent data loss and the runtime refuses it in production. Attach an S3-compatible bucket — Tigris is the one Fly provisions — with STORAGE_TYPE=s3. See Storage.

Next steps

• Deployment — the production checklist, and the first-admin rules every platform shares.
• Configuration — every environment variable the runtime reads.