Hey everyone! Welcome back to another post about my latest adventures in the world of tech 💻. This week I’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 Amazon’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
- Can’t set hard billing limits (If you exceed the free tier you just get charged 😬)
- UI didn’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 there’s no default UI on the free tier, yeah you could pay for it but I’m not interested in spending 700$ for a UI 😬 I did find an open source UI for it called but it was no longer maintained so this ended up being a no for me as well. That’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 🙏), 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 👌.
Note: I did discover another tool called Kubero, it looks interesting but found it after I setup CapRover so I didn’t evaluate it deeply. Here’s a link to check it out yourselves!
After playing around a bit I opted to setup my first project inside the droplet and it’s been the last time I’ve looked at fly.io. I immediately deleted my account and haven’t looked back since. If I need to scale out I’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 don’t, you’ll hate yourself for going down this path 😅 If you’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! 👨💻