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Comment by biorach | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure this is well-known enough yet - fly now supports scale-to-zero services using fly machines - https://fly.io/docs/machines/

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I've been trying fly machines with terraform and running into one bug after another: https://github.com/fly-apps/terraform-provider-fly/issues/12... https://github.com/fly-apps/terraform-provider-fly/issues/12... https://github.com/fly-apps/terraform-provider-fly/issues/12...

I was really excited since fly seems dead simple, but I haven't gotten it running yet...

The Terraform provider was a one off project from the community. We haven't really focused on it in earnest yet, unfortunately. We ended up sponsoring it, but until we get Fly apps off Nomad I don't think we'll have the best terraform story.

Ah, well that explains it I guess.

Though, it's a "partner" provider and it's in your official github account, plus there's no notices saying it's not officially supported... it would probably help people if that were a bit clearer.

Yep, this is a good note. Things got fuzzy, because we were so impressed by the person who took it upon themselves to randomly build a Terraform provider for us that we hired them.

Sorry, not to use this as a support forum, but what exactly does it need? Just some provider-side bug fixes? Or are there Fly-side changes that need to be made before it will work? If it's something small I wouldn't mind poking at it.

Just provider bug fixes / developments. The APIs it use are pretty stable. The particular errors in those issues look like either badly formed API calls, or something weird with auth.

It also probably needs an update to use api.machines.dev. It is currently trying to connect over wireguard to hit our private API, because we didn't have a public API endpoint when it was built. This is probably brittle. :)

What's api.machines.dev? The documentation here says you need a VPN connection still https://fly.io/docs/machines/working-with-machines/

Can I just sub `https://api.machines.dev` in for the api hostname everywhere?

Yeah. api.machines.dev is a public endpoint for our machines api.

EDIT: See this comment for an example on how to make the provider use the public endpoint https://github.com/fly-apps/terraform-provider-fly/issues/42...

EDIT EDIT: I pasted the wrong link, sorry about that.

Thanks! Is there any documentation on the stable API? The link I posted has some normal REST stuff for machines, but nothing on other resources. I can't find any central API reference/etc in your docs.

Looking at the code, it uses GraphQL? I can't find any documentation on your GraphQL API either though, aside from a web editor that doesn't appear to be linked anywhere official.

As fly apps v2 becomes more stable the docs will continue to improve. Watch this space :). As for the graphql, it's a bit of a thorny situation. The graphql exists primarily to service our needs internally and as such has no guaranteed contract. Unfortunately, however, for some things that's the only API that exists. The autogenerated docs in the playground are pretty good actually though. That said, we are working on improving our rest api so more things will be available there.

Does scale to zero work with ordinary fly apps yet?

Probably. Depends. For a simple app should be straighforward.

I set up a machine - a few weeks ago this involved a few direct api calls using curl - maybe `flyctl` can do it all now.

Then I deployed on that machine a version of my app that gracefully shut down if no requests were received for 60s.

Works great. Shuts down after a minute, boots back up in under a second when a request comes in.

See the docs for details

I found the docs difficult and inconsistent when moving between flyctl and cURL when I tried playing with machines a few months ago.

I daresay they'll be wonderful once the team get the machine stuff working under flyctl fully.

Their generous free tier does make it easy to play and assess though.

No, ordinary Fly apps (what we call v1 apps) are managed by nomad. They don't scale to zero. You can create a machine based app and it'll scale to zero just fine, but you lose most of the magic of `fly deploy` right now.

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