I’ve been using vite + svelte quite a lot and it’s super nice and extremely lightweight/flexible. Server side I stick mainly with flask because it’s the devil I know and it’s super simple to spin up a functional API. I use boostrap for a lot of prototyping, I usually pair it with bootstrap studio which is very good when it works.
Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?
#12Front-end: VanillaJS[1] or Elm
Server: Deno or Rust
Database: Postgres
Hosting: Cloudflare Pages and fly.io
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Front-end is usually the complex part, so I focus on that first. Elm creates fast and clean front-ends (and the community packages never have bugs), so I embed Elm when the UI demands extra complexity.
I generally keep my server code _extremely_ light-weight. I shove most of the complexity of my systems into the database queries, where it's easy to optimize.
I also find it useful to organize my API into "one POST for each button" and "one GET for each table".
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Re: Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?
#13I’ve been on this route before and evaluated tons of frameworks (Postgrest, Supabase,Directus, SpringBoot, FastAPI Laravel etc) and I’ve settled on the following to quickly create an MVP:
- Django+AlpineJS+HTMX
- Hugo+ Netlify for static landing page with a custom form linking to GForms.
Re: Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?
#14I am using old school php like this: ``` And tags of course, with vanilla JS. Super quick and reliable. No layers.
I use this on a current project as well. I have a (python) scraper that scrapes some data, and the PHP queries the database and displays the data. No JS, even.
To answer OP's sibling question, I don't do any authentication with projects I consider lightweight.
Re: Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?
#15After building SPAs in next.js and blogs in Hugo, I finally settled on the simplest stack: Caddy+Markdown/HTML templates I’ve talked about it more here: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog... But the gist is that you have a Caddyfile like: http://localhost, notes.alinpanaitiu.com { root * /static/notes/ file_server templates { mime text/html text/plain text/xml } encode zstd gzip try_files {p…
This is very cool, thanks for sharing. I just built a jekyll site and have plans for another SG site, so this is likely to get played with.
Re: Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?
#16Front end: Preact, Solid or VanillaJS
backend: a nasty hybrid of NodeJS, zsh and SQLite3
Re: Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?
#17Simple stuff. If I need more than basic static HTML, I'll reach for Flask and postgres.
Re: Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?
#18Remix Run
Re: Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?
#19Vanilla Javascript / HTML is the fastest for me. Maybe a couple of Python scripts for automation.
Re: Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?
#20I never use anything truly lightweight for personal projects or prototypes. For one thing, then I'd have to learn a lightweight stack in addition to the heavier ones for real projects, plus, they're not usually that fast and easy to use.
I'm a fan of Node/Svelte(I've never started a new project in it but I have enjoyed working on existing stuff in it).
For new work I'll almost always be using Python, CherryPy, and a Vue3/Websockets based approach, usually with quite a few supporting libraries.
I also use a lot of Mako templating, but I'm moving away from that as Mako doesn't have good IDE support and it can get in the way of realtime responsiveness.
If there will be content involved, which there often is, I'll use Showdown to render markdown.
One technology I really want to work with more is Microsoft's Adaptive Cards, they will likely be finding their way into my projects soon.
Against my better judgement I do have a project idea in mind at the moment, but it would need either Dart or Kotlin, and the backend would probably be MQTT, although anything personal project sized would be trashed instantly by a DDoS since part of the design involves an open public backend with all the security on the client.
And of course, if my project is embedded, ESP32+Arduino all the way, At $5 or so, there's rarely any reason to use a bare MCU or anything that doesn't have WiFi unless you're doing mass production.
One thing I never touch for anything personal is a database. No postgres, no mysql, none of it. If I need one I use sqlite.
If nobody is paying for I'm not doing sysadmin work at home. My stuff is all unzip and run, with dependencies from the Debian or language package repos.
I don't use Docker or Kubernetes or anything like that, because I avoid anything microservice-like, or anything that requires an external process with nontrivial configuration. Needing an MQTT broker or relying on an external daemon for something very big and complex like Zigbee2mqtt is about as far as I'll go.
Even apache/php is too much config for me. I have very little tolerance for system level configuration needed to support one specific app, and messing with containers isn't my idea of fun either.