Migrate from Fly.io

A Fly app becomes an InstaCloud compute service, Fly Postgres becomes a postgres service, and fly secrets become project secrets bound into the app. Fly is the easiest platform to leave, because a Fly app already has the one thing the others lack: a Dockerfile. InstaCloud offers:

Postgres with real branching. A branch opens as a copy-on-write clone holding all of the parent’s data, at its own connection string, so a feature or an agent task can run migrations nowhere near production.
Built for coding agents. A CLI and an MCP server your agent drives directly, with an approval gate on the actions that matter.
Flexible deployments. A local directory, a GitHub repo, or an image from any registry.
Managed services alongside. Postgres, Redis, MySQL, MongoDB, and object storage in one project.
Real support. An active community on Discord.

Migration steps

We will migrate Fly’s own Django example, a Python app with a Dockerfile. Its committed fly.toml, abridged, already holds most of what the migration needs:

app = "hello-django"
primary_region = "ams"

[build]

[env]
  PORT = "8000"

[http_service]
  internal_port = 8000

1. Point a coding agent at your Fly app

Work in the app’s own checkout: the Dockerfile and fly.toml it already holds are most of what the migration needs. Give your agent the skill there:

cd hello-django          # your app
npx -y insta@latest agent setup

That installs the insta CLI, the insta skill, and the MCP server for every coding agent on this machine. The skill is what knows how a Fly app maps onto services here.

2. Create a project

insta project create hello-django

Or click Create Project in the console. A new project starts empty.

3. Ask your agent to migrate

One thing first, because your agent cannot do it. Fly does not let anyone read a secret back: fly secrets list prints names and digests only. Either copy each value from wherever you set it, or read them off the running machine before you stop it:

fly ssh console -a hello-django -C 'printenv SECRET_KEY' | insta secrets set SECRET_KEY

The pipe keeps the value out of your terminal. Repeat per secret, but skip the DATABASE_URL that fly pg attach installed: your agent binds the new database under that name, and a copied string there would block the binding. Then hand over:

Prompt

Migrate my Fly app hello-django and its Fly Postgres to InstaCloud. The code is in this directory, with its Dockerfile and fly.toml. Follow the insta skill's migration runbook, and stop before sending traffic to it.

Because the Dockerfile is already there, your agent deploys straight from the directory with insta deploy ., no GitHub connection needed. It will ask you to approve anything that touches production, and expect it to scale the Fly app to zero before it copies the database, so nothing is still writing. Leave the Fly app stopped rather than destroyed, so you can go back to it. A machine left running would keep serving clients and writing to the old database.

Limitations

A few things are not here yet. Limitations covers the ones people hit most, and is worth the minute before you commit. Stuck anywhere? Come to Discord.

Overview

Database

Storage

Compute

Migrate

Agent-native

Self-hosting

Limitations

Migration steps

1. Point a coding agent at your Fly app

2. Create a project

3. Ask your agent to migrate

Limitations

​Migration steps

​1. Point a coding agent at your Fly app

​2. Create a project

​3. Ask your agent to migrate

​Limitations

Migration steps

1. Point a coding agent at your Fly app

2. Create a project

3. Ask your agent to migrate

Limitations