Switching to CapRover
Switching to CapRover

Switching to CapRover

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Hey everyone! Welcome back to another post about my latest adventures in the world of tech šŸ’». This week Iā€™ll be writing about my experience with spinning up an open source PaaS (Platform as a Service) to host my personal projects. Why? Well this all started because I was working on a Shopify project and I wanted to pull away from fly.io. It caused enough pain points for me that I felt like it was time to leave!
Note: What is a PaaS? Think Heroku or Amazonā€™s EBS.

Cons with Fly.io (At the time of writing)

  • Manual deployments with the CLI (I really dislike CLI)
  • Have to enter a credit card for the free tier
  • Canā€™t set hard billing limits (If you exceed the free tier you just get charged šŸ˜¬)
  • UI didnā€™t provide much besides looking nice, most of the control was done via the CLI

Pros

  • Easy to setup
  • Simple to understand UI

Needs

  • A way to plug and play github repos into the platform without setting up Github Actions
  • A clean and easy UI
  • MINIMAL UPKEEP

Options Explored

  • CapRover:

Result

Out of the above options Heroku was a no go because you have to start with a minimum payment to host your service and then adding DBs adds extra expenses; to me this was a no go. Then I ventured into Dockku, and I almost went with it until I realized thereā€™s no default UI on the free tier, yeah you could pay for it but Iā€™m not interested in spending 700$ for a UI šŸ˜¬Ā I did find an open source UI for it called but it was no longer maintained so this ended up being a no for me as well. Thatā€™s when I stumbled onto CapRover, this was by far the perfect solution to all my wants and needs! Easy to install (it has a digital ocean template to create a droplet šŸ™), minimal upkeep and it has a simple UI, plus native integration github. The icing on the cake is that it also has pre-configured community templates to setup different open source databases (including SurrealDB) & caches right away šŸ‘Œ.
Note: I did discover another tool called Kubero, it looks interesting but found it after I setup CapRover so I didnā€™t evaluate it deeply. Hereā€™s a link to check it out yourselves!
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After playing around a bit I opted to setup my first project inside the droplet and itā€™s been the last time Iā€™ve looked at fly.io. I immediately deleted my account and havenā€™t looked back since. If I need to scale out Iā€™d look into other long term solutions but for my personal projects and quick ideas this is perfect! Now do I recommend others go down this path? Not unless you enjoy DevOps work and find it interesting. If you donā€™t, youā€™ll hate yourself for going down this path šŸ˜… If youā€™re interested to give it a go, please check out their Get Started guide: https://caprover.com/docs/get-started.html; I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Thanks for joining me on my journey and happy hacking! šŸ‘Øā€šŸ’»
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