Learn how to deploy a Node.js application that persists data to multiple regions.

Intro to Deploy Distributed Apps with Node.js & Fly

Fly.io is the service we'll use for deploying our app. The first step is signing up for an account. 

Signing Up for Fly.io

We will deploy to Fly with Docker. A Dockerfile is used to tell Docker the steps to take to run our app.

Setting Up Docker

With the Dockerfile ready to go, let's deploy our app to Fly.

Deploying to Fly with Docker

Fly.io

Project Setup and First Deployment

Currently the counter state is reset to zero after every deployment. Creating a persistent volume with Fly solves this problem.

Persist Application Data Between Deployments

While not a replacement for testing, Fly offers health checks to prevent broken code from being deployed.

Adding Deployment Health Checks

Fly allows you to SSH into your app's virtual machine and run commands. Updating the Dockerfile to create a shortcut script makes the process run more smoothly.

Add a SQLite Console Shortcut with the Dockerfile

Configure GitHub Actions for Automatic Deployment

A staging environment is useful for play testing before pushing changes to production. This can be quickly set up with GitHub Actions and Fly

Add a Staging Environment

Persisting Data and Automatic Deployment

Deploying sites to multiple regions is less of a challenge than handling data. Fortunately Fly makes it easy to prepare for multi-region data.

Prepare for Multi-Region Data with LiteFS

If you're migrating to LiteFS from an existing application, you may have data you'd like to keep. Luckily, there's an easy process for importing it into LiteFS.

Import Existing Data into LiteFS

The Consul lease type provides a resilient solution in case the primary instance of our application goes down.

Set Up the Consul Lease Type

In order to make sure only our primary region attempts to write data, we'll set up a proxy server configuration for LiteFS

Set Up a Proxy Server for Multi-Region Database Support

With all the setup in place, it's time to scale our deployment to multiple regions, and test to confirm it's working as expected.

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