Set up PostgreSQL on Fly

Fly is a managed container platform with first class support for Postgres databases.

By the end of this article you'll have a deployed database and a connection string you can pass to your app.

Getting started

Use the Fly CLI to create a new postgres database.

fly postgres create

Choose whichever settings you want. When choosing a region, your top concern should be keeping your database as close as possible to your server.

Fly will output a connection string, which you can use to connect to your database from other Fly apps. Note that it ends in .flycast – this will not be valid outside of Fly.

Save the connection string to your app's .env file

DATABASE_URL="postgres://postgres:asdfasdfasdfasdf@app-name-1234.flycast:5432"

Make it accessible outside of Fly

If you want to access the database from outside of Fly, you'll need to allocate an IP address for it.

fly ips allocate-v6 --app app-name-1234

Then update your connection string to use the public .fly.dev domain instead of .flycast.

DATABASE_URL="postgres://postgres:asdfasdfasdfasdf@app-name-1234.fly.dev:5432"

Connect to your database

You should now be able to connect to the database using the connection string. If you have psql installed, you can run the following command:

psql "postgres://postgres:asdfasdfasdfasdf@app-name-1234.fly.dev:5432"

If you enter a new terminal session inside the database, then you've connected successfully and your database is ready to use.