Hey everyone! Welcome back to another post about my latest adventures in the world of tech š». This week Iāll 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 Amazonās 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
- Canāt set hard billing limits (If you exceed the free tier you just get charged š¬)
- UI didnāt 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 thereās no default UI on the free tier, yeah you could pay for it but Iām not interested in spending 700$ for a UI š¬Ā I did find an open source UI for it called but it was no longer maintained so this ended up being a no for me as well. Thatās 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 š), 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 š.
Note: I did discover another tool called Kubero, it looks interesting but found it after I setup CapRover so I didnāt evaluate it deeply. Hereās a link to check it out yourselves!
Ā
After playing around a bit I opted to setup my first project inside the droplet and itās been the last time Iāve looked at fly.io. I immediately deleted my account and havenāt looked back since. If I need to scale out Iād 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 donāt, youāll hate yourself for going down this path š
If youāre 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! šØāš»
Ā