Ask HN: If you were to build a web app today what tech stack would you choose?

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Literally anything, thanks to ChatGPT/CoPilot/etc.

Choosing a stack has always been a balance between "what you are currently productive in" and "the best possible tool for the job."

These days, assuming you have a base level of skill and experience, it's like 2-10x easier to get up to speed in a brand new stack thanks to those AI coding buddies

Your current competencies still matter and always will, but today, IMO we're way more free to choose the "best" tool and assume that we can get up to speed quickly.

Putting that aside, I still think Rails is amazing for "most" webby stuff. Would consider Flask if I needed things from the Python ecosystem. Or I guess Phoenix if I needed that massive concurrency. Would pair them with Postgres and/or Redis as needed.

For frontend... Vue? Or maybe just server-side rendering if I could get away with it.

The discussion is making me scared from another perspective.

I have experience with a pretty wide variety of development. I've worked with embedded microcontrollers (minimalistic RTOS), embedded applications (on top of a proper Linux), desktop applications in Java and in C#, some C++ work, gamedev and more. But to this day I haven't touched Web apps. I have not written a line of JS and the closest I've done to modern web is a tiny API in Go that sends a JSON response and renders a static HTML page.

With my total lack of Web experience (and self-confessed hate of webapps as a user), I have no opinions on React, Rails, Node.js, Vue and whatever people are naming here. But I'm taken aback at the variety - there's 20-odd replies all giving different answers.

Does Web development in 2023 not have 2-3 tech stacks that dominate? Are the existing frameworks/techs so lacking that new ones keep appearing to address those problems? Is there a high rate of change because things keep improving? If so, where is that improvement for me as a user, when webapps still feel inferior to late 90s native programs?

Curious what are you doing with both ansible and containers? What does ansible actually do in your setup?

I loved Drupal back in the day, but at some point (D8+, part of it moving to Symfony), it became too difficult to manage and for me personally to keep up with.

But I believe that, in the early days, Drupal made excellent foundational design choices as a framework, and if you used it's APIs in your custom module development, then, generally speaking, you would have a secure website.

But now, D7 is approaching EOL, and I absolutely don't want to migrate to the latest flavor. D7 has been rock solid for a decade, and I have no desire to chase the latest fad.

I wish that there were a stable, monolithic solution that is simpler to setup (as in including everything, including database, webserver, SSL certs, etc.) that just worked and was extendable and overridable programmatically, in the same way that Drupal was.

Modern web stacks have become a bucket of Lego pieces that seems ok if you are an expert in everything and know how to put everything together exactly. The problem is, most people aren't experts in form handling, login and authentication, media handling, caching, etc.