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EdgeDB is a graph-relational database that runs on top of Postgres and is designed as a spiritual successor to SQL. This guide explains how to perform a single-region deployment of EdgeDB with persistent storage. It will require two apps: one for Postgres and one for the EdgeDB container.

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Create the Postgres app

Create a Postgres app. You’ll need to replace mypostgres with a unique name of your choosing.

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Create the EdgeDB app

Create a directory and create a new app. Be sure to replace myedgedb with a custom name. When prompted, pick a region and a Fly organization.
Since we’re using flyctl launch, this will create a fly.toml. All flyctl commands will now be applied against our myedgedb application unless otherwise specified with --app. EdgeDB needs more RAM than the default 256MB so let’s scale the RAM to 1024MB.
Set a password for the EdgeDB instance as a Fly secret. Keep track of this password; it won’t be visible again.
We need to configure a few other environment variables too.
Let’s discuss what’s going on with all these secrets.
  • EDGEDB_SERVER_BACKEND_DSN_ENV tells EdgeDB which environment variable holds the Postgres connection string.
  • EDGEDB_SERVER_TLS_CERT_MODE tells EdgeDB to auto-generate a self-signed TLS certificate.
    • You may instead choose to provision a custom TLS certificate. In this case, you should instead create two other secrets: assign your certificate to EDGEDB_SERVER_TLS_CERT and your private key to EDGEDB_SERVER_TLS_KEY.
  • EDGEDB_SERVER_PORT tells EdgeDB to listen on port 8080 instead of the default 5656, as Fly uses 8080 for its default health checks.

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Attach and deploy

Let’s attach mypostgres to myedgedb.
This sets the value of DATABASE_URL in the myedgedb app and creates a new role called myedgedb in our Postgres database. By default, this role doesn’t have the full set of permissions EdgeDB needs to run. To change that, open a connection to your Postgres instance.
Then run the following REPL command.
Finally, our EdgeDB app is ready to deploy!
It may take a few minutes to fully deploy. Debug with flyctl logs and check the deployment status with flyctl status.

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Persist certificates

We need to persist the auto-generated TLS certificate to make sure it survives EdgeDB app restarts. (If you’ve provided your own certificate, skip this step.)

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Connection

You’ll be able to connect to your EdgeDB instance using the following DSN from other Fly.io apps in the same organization: edgedb://edgedb:mysecretpassword@myedgedb.internal:8080 To pass this DSN to another app, create a secret called EDGEDB_DSN containing this value. EdgeDB’s client libraries will read this environment variable and connect to your instance automatically.
If you’ve configured a Wireguard tunnel on your local machine, you’ll be able to open a REPL to your new EdgeDB instance with the edgedb CLI.