[HN Gopher] Show HN: An open-source, self-hostable Heroku and Ne...
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       Show HN: An open-source, self-hostable Heroku and Netlify
       alternative
        
       Author : andrasbacsai
       Score  : 193 points
       Date   : 2021-03-29 16:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (coollabs.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (coollabs.io)
        
       | debarshri wrote:
       | This is positioned to be competing product to netlify and vercel.
       | However, it doesn't make sense to host it yourself as core
       | benefit of host a static pages and node js apps on netlify is use
       | their CDN infrastructure. It would actually cost you more to host
       | self host it than using alternatives. Also this is definitely not
       | a PaaS substitute. It is great attempt at a netlify alternative,
       | but fall very short from being a production grade platform. Just
       | an analysis, don't burn me please.
        
         | kderbyma wrote:
         | this is exactly what I want. I myself prefer to host my own
         | servers and having this is exact the missing piece I've been
         | missing.
        
         | andrasbacsai wrote:
         | Atm, it's not aiming to be a production-grade system. Indie
         | hackers, hobbyists, probably do not need that to start working
         | on their side project. Also, I'm thinking of provide a hosted
         | version of it, but not know. I want to concentrate on the
         | features now.
        
           | debarshri wrote:
           | Ok, cool. Then it is a great hobby project to have!
        
           | jrochkind1 wrote:
           | When I saw it described as a "heroku and netlify
           | alternatives", I assumed it was meant to be a production-
           | grade system, that's what those words mean to me.
           | 
           | If those are wrong expectations, you might consider changing
           | your marketing.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | Couldn't you pair it with, say, Cloudflare? Perhaps something
         | like that is coming functionality within the product, but it's
         | easy enough to do yourself for now.
        
           | debarshri wrote:
           | Why not AWS for that matter. There is difference between IaaS
           | and PaaS. This is more in the realm of PaaS. You cannot
           | compare with infrastructure providers per say, in my opinion.
        
             | tyingq wrote:
             | I mentioned Cloudflare because the end-to-end setup to CDN
             | front whatever you create in "Coolify" is fairly simple and
             | likely once per site.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | Worth noting that Netlify's CDN recently had issues. I do think
         | Netlify is nice, but "production grade" sounds like something
         | that might require two providers.
         | 
         | See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26581027 for recent
         | discussion.
         | 
         | Also see: https://answers.netlify.com/t/support-guide-
         | minimizing-impac... ( _" To make sure you can minimize the
         | impact of our single-homed loadbalancer being down"_)
        
           | sofixa wrote:
           | Netlify are on multiple providers, but due to the DNS spec
           | being old ( no CNAMEs at root) many providers respecting it
           | without providing CNAME flattening, in some cases you have to
           | give use a regular old IP as an A record, hence the impact of
           | the GCP load balancer being down.
           | 
           | If one was using CNAME flattening, there was zero impact.
        
         | hanniabu wrote:
         | Since we're on the topic and I'm about to launch a static site,
         | any thoughts on CDN performance between Github, Netlify, and
         | Firebase?
        
           | Trufa wrote:
           | For frontend deployment nothing has come close to Netlify in
           | my experience. It's a game changer product.
        
             | daemon001 wrote:
             | +1
        
             | mxschmitt wrote:
             | I personally use Vercel mostly. Didn't do much with Netfliy
             | yet, both options should be fine.
        
       | codetheweb wrote:
       | This looks pretty cool! Is it basically Dokku with a web
       | interface?
       | 
       | https://dokku.com/docs/
        
         | michaelpb wrote:
         | Also a Dokku fan. I don't think this project is related or uses
         | it under the hood (
         | https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify/search?q=dokku ),
         | although it's clearly similar. The marketing page only mentions
         | Node.js support, but the Readme mentions using Buildpacks
         | (https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify ) although it still
         | isn't clear if it supports languages other than Node
         | JavaScript. I would assume though if the goal is to support
         | buildpacks and be a true Heroku replacement it will soon
         | support everything just like Dokku.
         | 
         | Definitely very cool and something to keep an eye on as it
         | develops!
        
           | joshmanders wrote:
           | Looking through code _[0]_ it doesn 't look like they use
           | buildpacks but just construct a Dockerfile based on some
           | config values and run `docker build`.
           | 
           |  _[0]:https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify/blob/main/api/pac
           | ks/no..._
        
         | chasd00 wrote:
         | I'm a big fan of Dokku and use it on a number of personal
         | projects. It's come a long way.
         | 
         | Having deployment just be a push to a remote repository is
         | really nice.
        
       | mplewis wrote:
       | For other folks who couldn't find the documentation for this
       | project: https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify
        
       | WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
       | I like it, I might try it against Caprover and Portainer to see
       | what's up.
        
       | mxschmitt wrote:
       | Building such a thing is not that a high effort, reliability,
       | extensibility and scalability are the things which are not easy
       | to implement. For a small scale like hobby projects it definitely
       | makes sense to use such stuff but not for things where you want
       | to press a button to provision new nodes in different regions
       | with e.g. GKE Autopilot or Render.com. Like things where you rely
       | on a bulletproof CDN e.g. from Vercel or Netfliy.
       | 
       | btw. I'm curious why their installer is 73MB in size:
       | https://get.coollabs.io/coolify-installer
        
       | _joel wrote:
       | It looks nice but I couldn't envisage using it personally. I love
       | netlify and it's whole CI/CD integration, but more importantly
       | it's free for 100GB/month. After that I'd just pay (as
       | 100GB/month for a static site seems a fair amount of virtual
       | footfall)
        
       | gwbas1c wrote:
       | One of the things that's valuable with Heroku is how simple it is
       | to get a domain name with a certificate for HTTPS.
       | 
       | Assuming I'm running that on my NAS, I understand setting up port
       | forwarding through my router; but what about domains and HTTPs?
        
       | amerine wrote:
       | Nice! Good Luck!
        
         | andrasbacsai wrote:
         | Thank you! :)
        
       | oakesm9 wrote:
       | Looks nice from screenshots on the Github page. It seems to be
       | very similar to Caprover (https://caprover.com/) with less
       | features but a slightly nicer design.
        
       | saurik wrote:
       | But Heroku was a closed-source, cloud-hosted, alternative to
       | self-hosting... can't you just, I dunno, run your app? :(
        
         | kybernetikos wrote:
         | Turns out there's an awful lot more to do to 'run your app'
         | than finish writing it and push to github which was the
         | workflow that heroku promised.
         | 
         | I absolutely want to be able to write small personal projects
         | and have them deploy on my cheap server in a sensible way by
         | simply pushing to my git repository.
         | 
         | At the moment I'm using caprover to do this, and it's so much
         | better than doing it myself, but I think there's plenty of
         | space to make this experience better.
        
         | joseph wrote:
         | I doubt if someone wanting to run an app is the target
         | audience. A lot of companies would love to have something like
         | Heroku that could be hosted internally. A platform team hosts
         | it and development teams consume it. As it stands, they are
         | stuck hand rolling their own poor implementations. Lots of
         | wasted person-hours are happening in this space due to a lack
         | of good, stable solutions that won't disappear (I don't know if
         | this one qualifies).
        
           | bassdropvroom wrote:
           | > As it stands, they are stuck hand rolling their own poor
           | implementations
           | 
           | It's either that or it's the monster that is Kubernetes.
        
             | sofixa wrote:
             | Multiple projects like OpenFaaS and Knative try to bridge
             | that moat.
             | 
             | And then there's also Nomad, which is drastically simpler
             | than k8s. Not Heroku-easier, but closer to docker-compose
             | than Kubernetes.
             | 
             | Self-plugging my article on the Nomad vs Kubernetes
             | subject: https://atodorov.me/2021/02/27/why-you-should-
             | take-a-look-at...
        
             | mikepurvis wrote:
             | I'm still relatively green, so there are likely a bunch of
             | Kubernetes nightmare scenarios I haven't encountered, but I
             | recently stood up microk8s to provide workers for Jenkins
             | and GitLab CI, and I thought the ergonomics of it were
             | great-- easy to get going, easy to deploy stuff with the
             | integrated helm3, easy to access the dashboard and get
             | metrics out of it.
             | 
             | I'm sure there's still a gap to be bridged there between
             | that and a PaaS which you literally just add as a git
             | remote. But I don't think it's huge.
        
           | joshmanders wrote:
           | I've learned this too, and that's why at my company
           | (https://primcloud.com) we're building obviously a PaaS for
           | those who want Heroku/Netlify experience, but also building
           | it in a way that we plan to package it up and offer an
           | enterprise solution where you can install it on your own
           | infrastructure, like GitHub Enterprise. This allows you to
           | have the same experience but be in full control.
        
       | ezekg wrote:
       | I've used Heroku for over 7 years. Heroku's selling point is
       | essentially devops-as-a-service. That's why they can get away
       | with charging so much compared to the hosting competition. A
       | "self-hostable Heroku" doesn't make sense, at least to me. With
       | this, I'd have to do devops, like every other hosting platform.
       | Granted, I did only scan the home page, so perhaps I'm missing
       | something.
        
       | thepra wrote:
       | Other than github, gitea/gitlab is supported? Is there CI/CD for
       | .Net Core kind of apps?
        
         | andrasbacsai wrote:
         | Currently, not, but it's planned to support more Git providers,
         | and other kind of apps, like PHP (I like it, roast me). :)
        
       | sneak wrote:
       | For comparison, the one I use is called CapRover, and works great
       | for my small use cases. It's like dokku with a web interface, and
       | can do rebuilds from git webhooks.
        
         | antman wrote:
         | Another vote for CapRover, has many addons easy to also add
         | also your docker based apps. Not a full production system but
         | nice out of the box interface and monitoring. If it removes its
         | single points of failure it might even turn out to compete with
         | the big guys.
        
       | FearlessNebula wrote:
       | Im not sure I understand the need for this. Isn't the point of
       | Heroku a platform as a service to abstract out having to host it
       | yourself? Wouldn't someone just host the app at that point?
        
       | arisudesu wrote:
       | Looks promising. Judging by the screenshots, this just solves
       | what I didn't like about Dokku - the need to configure the
       | application from the terminal, instead of a convenient web panel.
       | 
       | Will it be possible to use Golang? Or use the Dockerfile from the
       | repository to build the container and run it? This way you can
       | even compete with Portainer.
        
         | nvr219 wrote:
         | must be dokku (dock)
        
         | RileyJames wrote:
         | Interesting, that cli focused deploy / management is what I
         | like about dokku. It fits well with into the rails dev cycle
         | which rarely leaves the terminal / text editor.
        
         | andrasbacsai wrote:
         | It will support other languages, not just Node.js. About
         | Dockerfile, I do not see any problem with supporting that case
         | as well, but not in my top priorities now. :)
        
       | bgorman wrote:
       | Why would anyone use this instead of Dokku?
        
         | f6v wrote:
         | I wonder how these two compare when it comes to scaling. Last
         | time I tried Dokku it wasn't meant to run on several instances.
        
           | andrasbacsai wrote:
           | Currently scaling is not possible, but most parts are built
           | scaling in mind. I would like to support Kubernetes later on,
           | but first Docker Swarm, which is way simpler.
        
           | joshmanders wrote:
           | Dokku now has a kubernetes scheduler to allow it to scale
           | horizontally also.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | It does have a built-in web UI.
         | 
         | https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExRnXpbWYAkOO-x?format=jpg&name=...
         | 
         | https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExRnXpdXIAAmP_8?format=jpg&name=...
         | 
         | https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExRnXpdXEAQHu5B?format=jpg&name=...
         | 
         | Though I'm sure many 3rd party ones exist for Dokku.
        
         | andrasbacsai wrote:
         | It will more than a PaaS. Planned to have services integrated,
         | that needed for your application, like analytics, error
         | reporting, feedback management, etc.
        
           | TruthWillHurt wrote:
           | It's not more than a PaaS when it's running on a single
           | machine.
        
       | dominik-2020 wrote:
       | For me the whole point of using netlify is that I don't need to
       | do anything. Set and forget.
        
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       (page generated 2021-03-29 23:00 UTC)