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Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#501

Post by naikrovek »

swat535 wrote: post #422
naikrovek wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, here's one reason: the amount of time saved when standing up a webapp on Rails is absolutely insignificant compared to the life of that webapp in all situations where that webapp is anything serious. Not to say that Rails apps aren't serious! I'm just saying that the time saved in standing up a webapp with Rails vs., say, Java, is miniscule compared to the develooment life of that application, overall. In short…

You're absolutely right. We should all over engineer our applications by picking the most complicated stack possible because the long term goal may slightly benefit the short term goal of you know.. actually making money out of our business. Why pick a simple Rails + Postgres stack when you can setup Oracle + Java because you will require enterprise level scaling for your first 1-100k users Oh and just for the record…

That's like saying that php is a good choice because so many sites use it. Php is never a good choice. Neither is Rails.

Shower me with downvotes. IDGAF; Ruby is rubbish.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#502

Post by marcus_holmes »

BLanen wrote: post #282
dom96 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your start is good but you add complexity on top of it. Install Golang on your VPS, clone the source code on it and compile it there instead of messing with cross compilation. Also use sqlite to avoid the pain of setting up a SQL server, there is no need for it. You can then easily get systemd to supervise your binary. This is how I host all my web apps, the main difference is that I don't use Go but Nim. If you want…

Better would be to just use docker.

Please explain. I still don't understand the use-case for docker...

How is docker going to make my life easier in this example?

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#503

Post by marcus_holmes »

dwaite wrote: post #193
49bc wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many web apps can you name that don’t rely on any external gems? Packaging that mess is a pain in every scripting language.

How far do you make it writing a web app in rust or go without pulling in external packages, then? Or a front-end using only javascript and html?

I never use server-side external packages when writing web apps (well, except the bcrypt crypto package, which is an official package but not technically part of the stdlib yet).

Dependencies are evil.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#504

Post by marcus_holmes »

ngrilly wrote: post #458
dom96 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often is that really required? OP asked for a quick deploy, for most apps it's enough to put the db into read-only mode and then update the schema. Upgrading the app binary is as simple as replacing it on the file system and then restarting the service.

The more often we deploy with CI/CD, the more we need zero downtime deploy. Putting the DB in read-only mode is not that simple, because the app needs to be able to work in a degraded read-only mode.

Yeah DB migrations are a pain in the bum. I do them manually because I still haven't found a tool that handles them properly.

But by the time there's significant data to migrate to the new schema, any schema change is usually due to a major version change or feature implementation, and the migration is part of a wider pain-in-the-bum situation.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#505

Post by nikdaheratik »

For me, it's Laravel + Git(hub) + Bootstrap/AdminLTE/Whatever frontend.

But I already know this stack and I already have a server setup that can just let me fork a new app into one of the subdirectories or subdomains. If you want something public facing, there are only so many corners you can cut as being pwned is much more embarassing than having a prototype crash and burn during a demo.

Frameworks are good in that they let you make something fast + powerful without having to worry about alot of the details once it is setup. The problem is you have to tackle the learning curve for the setup. Finding something with good documentation is the best way to handle this even if it takes more work to learn than you want to spend on a "throwaway" project.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#506

Post by nikdaheratik »

kristopolous wrote: post #168

Vanilla php + html5up + sqlite3. Everyone else here is trying to be stylish and fancy. Your customers don't care what language it's in or whether the code is beautiful. No cutting edge incomplete frameworks, convoluted tooling, piles of inaccurate documentation to read, inexplicable cryptic error messages with a bunch of incorrect solutions on stack overflow, or other incompetently over engineered bullshit. Just go a…

You're wrong. This is a case where whatever you're comfortable with is the best solution. Just because you personally don't know frameworks, or js frontends, doesn't mean the people who do are inferior or less secure.

I guarantee someone who knows how to work a framework can turn out the same work much more quickly and more maintainable than someone who is working from Vanilla PHP and having to implement basic logins and email templates on their own. And a "throwaway project" can also be turned into something customer facing much more quickly as well.

I agree, you don't need to pick bleeding edge tech, but you should pick something stable and well documented and run with it rather than basically having to rewrite the same project in the framework once you've got it up and running in vanilla PHP.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#507

Post by cutler »

TezlaOil wrote: post #476
cutler wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just going for a figure similar to the $10/month cited. You can get a 2GB RAM VPS at Hetzner for as little as 2.50 Euros per month.

The cited price was $10/year, not $10/month. That's a huge difference.

Ok, so yesterday's shared hosting prices are today's VPS rates. The point is they've both become commoditised so the PHP/cheap hosting argument is no longer valid.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#508

Post by pkphilip »

The Crystal-language based Amber Framework (https://amberframework.org/) is a good framework to use if you want to ramp up a web application with a backend database and a full MVC stack in next to no time.

It also helps that it is an extremely fast framework. https://github.com/tbrand/which_is_the_fastest

Other frameworks like router.cr, Raze etc are faster performing, but getting started with a db middleware etc will take a bit longer.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#509

Post by jsmeaton »

innomatics wrote: post #315
jsmeaton wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask how you’re managing secrets with this setup? For example, the secret key or database URL. Our current setup deploys an env file which is sourced before starting the process. I’m less sure how this translates to a production docket deployment.

In ECS you can store them in the task definitions which is easy but might not be secure enough in certain situations. More robust is to read them in from the Parameter Store see https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/managing-secrets-for-am...

Thanks, exactly what I was looking for.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

#510

Post by jsmeaton »

slow_donkey wrote: post #257
jsmeaton wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask how you’re managing secrets with this setup? For example, the secret key or database URL. Our current setup deploys an env file which is sourced before starting the process. I’m less sure how this translates to a production docket deployment.

Docker shouldn't affect your secrets management because secrets shouldn't be baked into your image anyways. I tend to expose them as environment vars and currently use Kubernetes to expose a keyvault url/password so the app can automatically grab all the secrets

We manage them with env vars now. But we use salt (encrypted) to deploy a secrets file onto the server which is sourced before the app is started. With something like ECS I didn’t know if you could feed it an env file, and if you could, how you could make it available.
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