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We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

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Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#191

Post by llbbdd »

troad wrote: post #168
sgarland wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all trivial, and can and should be automated. Furthermore, all of your arguments can easily be applied to NodeJS version deprecations, React realizing they shipped a massive CVE, etc. I will die on this hill: parent is correct - the ability to manage a Linux server should be a requirement to work in the industry, even if it has fuck-all to do with your job. It proves some basic level of competence and knowled…

I keep reading posts like this, but the people who say this never actually seem to enlighten the rest of us troglodytes by, say, writing a comprehensive, all inclusive, guide to doing this. If it's so easy, surely it's no big undertaking to explain how one self hosts a fully secured server. No shortcuts, no "just use the usual setup" (we don't know what it is!), no skipped or missed bits. Debian to Caddy to Postgres,…

They don't write the guide because by the time they've written the guide to an appropriate level of specification, the result they've produced is an off-the-shelf service provider not unlike the ones they're railing against.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#192

Post by dawnerd »

kennu wrote: post #136
fnoef wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no! Issuing SSL certificates! The horror! I really doubt that people who can’t install an ssh key should be able to practice software engineering. Sometimes, I think that software engineering should be a protected profession like other types of engineering. At least it will filter out the people who can’t keep their OS up to date.

This is not about how easy or difficult it is to issue TLS certificates, to configure SSH keys or to update the OS. It's about having to actively maintain them yourself in every possible situation until eternity, like when TLS versions are deprecated, SSH key algorithms are quantum-hacked, backward-incompatible new OS LTS versions are released, and so on. You will always have new stuff come up that you need to take c…

I self host my own server and this isn't something that takes much time per year. You're making it sound like a day job. It's not really. As long as you have a solid initial config you shouldn't have to worry.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#193

Post by cornholio »

xandrius wrote: post #75
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #42

I migrated the landing pages for my app[1] from Nextjs to Astrojs mainly because I was paying Vercel $20 per month for serving static pages(it’s 4 times more than I pay Railway for the Postgres database for the actual app and also 4 times more than I pay Cloudflare for hosting all my apps). I used AI for migrating and it took a few days only as the existing repo was used as “instructions” and it included some upgrade…

Why is everyone so afraid to get a $5/mo Ubuntu/Debian VPS, install nginx and call it a day? Then you can even run multiple projects off the same server.

I don't even bother setting up VPS instances by hand. If you have gmail then you have access to Google Cloud, and they offer a free tier of Cloud Run that comfortably covers anything you might do on a personal project.

You basically create a github, put a dockerfile inside it with your nginx config, frontend files, backend etc., then push and the Cloud Run instance is built for you then deployed into production. By default you are paying only for active requests, when a http request hits your box GCP will wake it up, charge for the CPU time used for serving it, then leave it idle for free for about 15 minutes. If another hit comes in that interval, you have instantaneous response because the instance is warm, otherwise it will wake up again and see a few seconds of latency (ie. during the night, when you have few visitors etc).

It also scales up automatically if you have substantial traffic, you don't have to do anything other than design your application so that multiple instances hitting the same data storage (ex. Firestore) will play nice. It of course handles all security, versioning, HTTPS certs etc. for you, you are simply serving plain HTTP traffic within the GCP internal network and just make sure your own application (what you push to git) is secure.

The things you pay for are outbound traffic (for obvious reasons like warez etc.) as well as storage of docker images (Artifact registry, i think you only have 0.5GB free, about 3 alpine images), but you can easily set up a rule to auto-delete old images.

Overall, you can run a small business with daily/weekly updates for less than a dollar a month and hit 5 nines availability, which you will never achieve for a self-administered VPS. Sorry if it sounds like an advertisement, but it's just enormous value for a small builder.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#194

Post by pjmlp »

chrisweekly wrote: post #138
tacker2000 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TanStack started out by providing a very good JS table library. Now they offer a Router, and some more libs. They are definitely an up and coming name in the JS space.

That's... not quite right. [EDIT] I typed "Router" when I meant "Query". TanStack Query is the relatively newer name for React Query -- one of the most popular JS libraries of all time. TanStack Start is a recent metaframework (and the one w/ the brightest future, IMO), but Tanner and team have profoundly significant bona fides. IOW, the dev team is far from being the "new kids on the block".

Nah, they are the next toy for the magpie developers, now that Next.js is no longer cool.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#195

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

huksley wrote: post #31
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #15

The irony is deploying NextJS on the railway platform is super slow since they use containers, on Vercel 2 min is like 12 min on railway, deployments on a vps are only like 20 seconds. *I know this is just build time, so this is different then their deployement time

Not containers to blame but overprovisioning and how much resources dedicated to building. I am not sure how Vercel gets things build in literal seconds, but, hey, they are the creators of NextJS. At DollarDeploy we building it also in containers but every build get 4GB/2CPU so it is quite fast but not as fast as Vercel.

I build some projects via pm2 deploy directly on a server and its much faster then vercel

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#196

Post by cryptonym »

mschuster91 wrote: post #146
sosodev wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the unfortunate truth is the simplest. Web development has long been detached from rationality. People are drawn to complexity like moths to a flame.

> People are drawn to complexity like moths to a flame. Not to complexity, but to abstraction. The more something is abstracted away, the more fungible "developers" become, to the eventual tune of Claude Code. No one cares that trying to debug a modern application is as hellish as its performance, the KPI that executives go for is employment budget.

It might be really efficient when you "vibe" and don't know exactly what you want.

On serious projects, it feels like even Claude Code could be more efficient with simple technologies, providing near-instant build and debug. With reduced abstractions and output looking like input, it can better understand how to fix things rather than trying to guess how to manipulate framework state or injecting hacks.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#197

Post by mememememememo »

recursive wrote: post #84
mememememememo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the above. It is a utility (I guess framework maybe) for a feature that was cool in ASP.NET back in 2005. But that is it's charm. It is just JS swapping out the dom for you.

Not sure what you're thinking of, but the first release of HTMX was 2020. Its predecessor, intercooler, was first released in 2013.

Yep but the idea goes back further. Memory is vague but this may have been it. https://www.ajaxtoolkit.net/DynamicPopulate/DynamicPopulate....

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#198

Post by mdrzn »

kamikazeturtles wrote: post #107
kami23 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just did this over at Hetzner and Claude admins it for me so I don't need to learn the CLI or anything, describe the proxying I want, and it setups up a bunch of small side project pages for me.

How do you use Claude to admin it? Does Claude SSH into the server and do everything or just write bash scripts?

ssh into the VPS and launch ClaudeCode directly on the machine, so it has full access

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#199

Post by xandrius »

kennu wrote: post #89
xandrius wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone so afraid to get a $5/mo Ubuntu/Debian VPS, install nginx and call it a day? Then you can even run multiple projects off the same server.

It means you take responsibility of maintaining the server forever, i.e. dealing with TLS certificates, SSH keys, security updates, OS/package updates, monitoring, reboots when stuck, redeploy when VPS retired, etc. Usually things work fine for a year or two and then stuff starts to get old and need attention and eat your time.

You clearly haven't tried doing that in quite a long while.

Using SSH keys + fail2ban means that for a simple static site, it will be sufficient for a decade at least.

TLS certificates get auto-renewed with letsencrypt every 3 months via certbot.

Installing security updates depends heavily on what is your threat model, if you're just displaying some static content you fully own, you'll be usually fine.

Literally never seen a VPS being "retired", if it happened to you, change provider.

I've got a bunch of VPS running for 10+ years, I never need to touch them anymore.

My homelab has been going strong for the past 8 years. I did have to do some upgrade/maintenance work to go from being an old laptop without screen to a minitower low power machine, and when I added 30TB of storage. Other than that, it's running smoothly, it also uses TLS and all the rest.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#200

Post by xandrius »

cornholio wrote: post #193
xandrius wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone so afraid to get a $5/mo Ubuntu/Debian VPS, install nginx and call it a day? Then you can even run multiple projects off the same server.

I don't even bother setting up VPS instances by hand. If you have gmail then you have access to Google Cloud, and they offer a free tier of Cloud Run that comfortably covers anything you might do on a personal project. You basically create a github, put a dockerfile inside it with your nginx config, frontend files, backend etc., then push and the Cloud Run instance is built for you then deployed into production. By d…

I still think you described using a VPS but with a tons of extra steps, expenses and then being tied to an evil corporation people are trying to move past.

You get a generic VPS and you can do whatever the hell you like, not paying bigG for some "obvious reasons" like outbound traffic.

And a small business will never need 5 nines availability, that's just the propaganda from big tech to over engineer and pay them for that. You can run a small/medium business and be offline for 1 hour every day (makes it 95.8%) and still be fine. It's when you're worldwide and not that small that you want better availability.

Also, you know all those AWS outages? My VPSs were never impacted to the slightest!

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