Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform

Hi HN! I’m Dillon, the founder of Celest (https://celest.dev). Celest is a backend-as-a-service that lets you build full-stack Flutter and Dart apps without leaving your IDE. There’s a short demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evs1f0zHpzk

At AWS, I built the Amplify Flutter framework and saw the extraordinary power (and complexity) the modern cloud presents. I wore many hats in that role, but the hat I most disliked was devops. I just wanted to write my business logic and have it work.

As a Flutter developer, I love writing Dart, and I want to use it everywhere. But in order to do so today, it requires stringing together Docker, Terraform and a healthy dose of cloud expertise to make it work. I built Celest so that I never have to use anything but Dart in my backends, and so other Flutter developers won’t either!

Celest brings infrastructure-from-code to Dart in a way that’s fun to write. Cloud functions are just top-level Dart functions and the inputs and outputs are automatically serialized for you. Run celest start to spin up a local environment with hot reload, and celest deploy to deploy to our managed cloud in under a few minutes. A type-safe client is generated for you as you build to create an RPC-like interface for your backend.

Celest currently offers serverless functions, authentication, and authorization. Our goal for the coming months is to further offer an offline-first SQL database and ORM. One cool thing about our authorization mechanism is a novel token format which combines Google’s Macaroons [1] with the Cedar policy language [2] for expressing caveats. I call them Corks! https://github.com/celest-dev/celest/tree/main/packages/cork...

You can download the CLI at https://celest.dev and play in a local environment for free with no sign ups. The client runtime is open-sourced as BSD at https://github.com/celest-dev/celest. There are some examples here: https://github.com/celest-dev/celest/tree/main/examples.

Check us out and let us know what you think!

[1] https://research.google/pubs/macaroons-cookies-with-contextu...

[2] https://www.cedarpolicy.com/en

Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform
celest.dev

Much appreciated!

Yes, absolutely. The main differences are

1. Celest is fully managed and does not require any knowledge of the cloud. With Serverpod, you must have a cloud account and manage your own infrastructure.

2. In Celest, all of your backend and infrastructure logic is defined solely in Dart. This differs from Serverpod which incorporates technologies like Docker, Terraform, and YAML to define your backend.

There are similarities too. Celest will auto-generate a client library for you like Serverpod and provides a local development environment. Uniquely, though, Celest supports hot reload for your backend ;-)

That looks cool, reminds me of long ago when I happily used Heroic, even though Celest is very different.

Question: I know a few Clojure enthusiasts who really enjoy Clojure+Dart backend. Is Celest compatible for this workflow?

I appreciate the free plan, any goals on adding celest to homebrew and chocolately?