[HN Gopher] Devpush - Open-source and self-hostable alternative ...
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Devpush - Open-source and self-hostable alternative to Vercel,
Render, Netlify
Author : el_hacker
Score : 238 points
Date : 2025-10-07 10:07 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| felixbecker wrote:
| This looks very sleek but coolify.io is also open source and a
| more mature project in my opinion.
| hunvreus wrote:
| Coolify.io is definitely more mature.
|
| I built /dev/push because I wanted to offer a more streamlined
| UX, closer to what Vercel offer.
|
| I am planning on adding more runtimes (there's a PR for Bun for
| example), support for custom containers and support for Docker
| Swarm, allowing you to manage multiple servers with a single
| instance.
| baobun wrote:
| I think you can get stronger by building your own identity
| (rather than "like vercel") - starts with the
| headline/tagline and pitch in a way that stands on its own.
|
| "Open source X alternatives" are dime-a-dozen and put a limit
| on what you can be in the eyes of users. It also sets
| expectations such that differences easily become
| disappointment. Not having a global CDN can otherwise simply
| be out of scope but can be "missing feature" when pitched as
| an alternative to an established service.
| hunvreus wrote:
| Sure. I just thought it'd be easier to explain what it does
| at first. That was mostly a personal project initially.
| sharperguy wrote:
| The trouble I have is that when I see a headline like this
| on hackernews my first thought is always "huh.. so what are
| netlify and vercel?" Maybe most people on here already use
| those daily but not being in web development I usually
| don't.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I prefer Dokploy, Coolify sometimes has random bugs
| written-beyond wrote:
| Exactly, Dokploy doesn't get enough recognition because they
| don't burn through funds by spending it on marketing on
| YouTube channels
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I don't think Coolify does that either, it was just one of
| the first modern PaaS that got traction after Dokku and
| CapRover which I consider a bit older and less modern, no
| GUI for example, but people seem to want a GUI for
| deployment management.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i started with coolify but ended up at dokploy
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Looks very comfy, I am glad there is so many new alternatives to
| manage deployments _a la_ Heroku. I remember even back in 2018 it
| was hard to find any good options to beat Heroku 's level of
| functionality.
|
| I made a Dokku wrapper myself and manage my deployments that way,
| I'm pretty happy about it these days, but again it's nice to see
| more alternatives in the wild.
| hunvreus wrote:
| Did you open source it?
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I haven't, recently I've been polishing the code a little bit
| with hopes to do just that.
| hunvreus wrote:
| That'd be great, I'd definitely look at it.
| baobun wrote:
| Vercel alternatives are getting traction and relevance after
| Vercel and CEO controversies like last weeks
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416353
| pjmlp wrote:
| Vercel is like other big corporations that places like HN and
| Reddit like to hate, most C suites signing off consulting
| contracts and partner deals couldn't care less.
|
| As such there are plenty of deployments, where the only
| deployment option is between Vercel, Netlify and co, usually
| Vercel ends up winning on the portfolio and partner deals.
|
| You don't see geeks selling their Apple gear in droves, despite
| the deals that its CEO has been doing as well.
| cess11 wrote:
| What Apple executive has published photographs of themselves
| being giddy next to a person with an arrest warrant from the
| ICC?
| pjmlp wrote:
| This one, https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cp8zyyygxv7o
| itsnowandnever wrote:
| obviously not the same
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends on where one stands on wiping out US democracy
| and those supporting those efforts.
| cess11 wrote:
| Fine, no ICC arrest warrant yet but good enough.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| The idea of the average Redditor turning against a company
| because of pro-Israel sentiment is a little humorous. But I
| agree overall: the average American plays lip service when it
| comes to morality. Threatening to cancel some subscriptions
| after years of carnage is peak slacktivism. What the tech
| leaders are doing is much more honest from that perspective,
| no games are being played. What the 20s have shown is that
| the American populace is a paper tiger.
| rmonvfer wrote:
| I read HN every day, it seems kinda crazy I missed this...
| jasoncartwright wrote:
| Political posts are often squashed from the homepage quite
| quickly (and for good reason)
| timmytokyo wrote:
| Heaven forbid that anyone discover the horrible things our
| tech overlords are doing in the world.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Is there a good list of alternatives + reviews / GH stars
| anyone can recommend?
| flawn wrote:
| Coolify is great and has a Collab with Hetzner!
| myth_drannon wrote:
| I have a persistent feeling that Pro-Paliz people who have
| those kinds of reactions to a famous X who went to Israel/met a
| Prime Minister/met a Jew or whatever, operate in a completely
| different reality, with their large parts of brain activity
| completely overwhelmed with emotions of pure hate ( that
| probably comes from untreated trauma, mental illness).
|
| Here we have people who use Intel, Nvidia chips that are
| developed in Israel. With leaders who are very friendly with
| the people and the government of Israel. And employees who
| spent many months of combat in Gaza. OpenAI who just signed a
| contract with Nubeius(Israeli company). But no, let's cancel
| Vercel CEO, or celebrate that some noname artist blocks
| streaming in Israel.
|
| It's so pathetic and sad. But I also understand it's all
| emotion and that some people live through their lives based on
| that.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| I would argue that not understanding why that photo would be
| controversial requires a greater emotional disconnect and
| lack of awareness. Believing that not all lives are equally
| valuable is generally considered a symptom of the disordered.
| baobun wrote:
| > I have a persistent feeling..,
|
| > It's so pathetic and sad. But I also understand it's all
| emotion and that some people live through their lives based
| on that.
|
| It does seems it's all emotion on your end. Projecting much?
| Tried empathy for a change?
|
| > OpenAI who just signed a contract with Nubeius(Israeli
| company)
|
| I bet there'd be controversy on that too if attempts to raise
| awareness weren't even further buried by puppets.
| maelito wrote:
| What's the difference with Dokploy ?
| hunvreus wrote:
| Dokploy and Coolify are a more container-centric. That means
| they're a lot more powerful, but also require a bit more
| massaging.
|
| I wanted to build something closer to what Vercel offers, with
| a more streamlined UX out of the box.
| maelito wrote:
| Very interesting, thanks ! Would have tried if not already
| well invested in Dokploy.
| sgarland wrote:
| I get the appeal, but am also horrified at the "let's pipe
| scripts to bash with sudo," and the lack of visibility into what
| the DB is doing.
|
| I am a _huge_ proponent of running your own, but along with that
| comes a responsibility to know what you're doing. If you don't
| know how to harden a Linux box on your own, frankly you have no
| business hosting anything on it. Spin up a VM and learn from your
| mistakes first. Similarly, I maintain that if you don't know how
| to administer and tune an RDBMS, you shouldn't be using it for
| anything that matters.
|
| If you think this sounds like gate-keeping, I'd ask you to re-
| read what I wrote. I think you have a responsibility to others
| who are relying on your skills to know what you're doing, or at
| the very least, understand enough about their fundamentals to
| know how to reverse mistakes.
| hunvreus wrote:
| I have a draft ARCHITECTURE.md file in the repo:
| https://github.com/hunvreus/devpush/blob/main/ARCHITECTURE.m...
|
| I'm also working on adding manual steps so that folks who
| prefer to deploy the app themselves can do so.
|
| I initially had the app deployed with Terraform + Ansible, but
| rewrote it as a bash script as I thought it'd be lower
| friction.
| sgarland wrote:
| Thanks for this. I want to clarify something: the "you" in my
| post was directed at users of a product like this, not you,
| the creator.
|
| Re: lower friction, you're probably correct, though that also
| brings with it concerns like those that I posted. While
| installing Terraform and Ansible isn't difficult, it might
| keep people away who have no interest in any form of systems
| administration, and so we come full circle again.
| hunvreus wrote:
| That's all good.
|
| And this is definitely more targeted at programmers who
| just want to deploy their app and may have limited interest
| in DevOps/sysadmin/servers.
| h33t-l4x0r wrote:
| Or better yet just have AI go over it, because who has the
| cognitive bandwidth to audit every FOSS project on top of
| everything else they have to get to today
| sgarland wrote:
| This does not solve the problem of knowing what you're doing.
| If anything it makes it worse, because you _think_ you
| understand it.
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| Doing all that on your own server is fun and not too hard IMO.
| Like if you can learn React this is orders of magnitude easier
| but perhaps way more boring or beneath people?
|
| I mean for DB I run a prod mariadb on hetzner and it is
| arguably easier to install and setup than say things most devs
| use, say vscode. Had to tune a couple of things (number of
| allowed connections for a user) but lots of good docs out there
| to help.
| dmoose wrote:
| I agree with this point completely and have been maintaining at
| least a few linux servers for many years now. However, I never
| feel completely comfortable about it because it is not my
| primary responsibility and I know the target is always moving.
| If you have any good resources to recommend for current best
| practices I'm sure they would be useful for me as well as
| anyone deploying this kind of tool.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If you're self hosting, IMO following Vercel is not the model.
| Use KEDA and K8s, and if you need compute at the edge lean into
| Cloudflare. That way you're staying standardized, and your vendor
| lock in is for best in class edge support.
| hunvreus wrote:
| I get the appeal, but personally I stay away from k8s. I don't
| mind putting in work to set up my deployment pipeline, but on a
| day to day I just want to push code to my repo and potentially
| edit environment variables. That's the sweet spot I was trying
| to hit.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| you can do that with k8s and argo?
| hunvreus wrote:
| Sure, I just wanted a simple and user-friendly experience.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Not trying to be dismissive here but if you're deploying
| regularly and you have plans to scale anything putting the
| time into learn and automate K8s pays off very quickly. What
| you're doing here gives me ORM vibes - good for training
| wheels and helping people that don't know stuff to be
| productive quickly, but ultimately a source of lots of
| problems that you wouldn't encounter if you didn't invest in
| a leaky abstraction.
| felixgallo wrote:
| Are you suggesting K8S is free of leaky abstractions?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I'm suggesting for this case it's closer to ground truth
| than a hand rolled Vercel clone, because it's been battle
| tested and tweaked HEAVILY.
| felixgallo wrote:
| Containers on top of K8S is radically less ground truthy
| than this project, and you say heavily tweaked like it's
| a good thing. I doubt there is a single person alive who
| understands even half of all of those tweaks.
| jtbaker wrote:
| K8s for APIs and job processing, and CF workers for hosting
| sites at the edge is kind of the dream for me right now. Have
| you used their new-ish VPC networking to handle secure
| networking between the two?
|
| https://www.cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2025/cloudfl...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I have done a good amount of integration work with cloudflare
| in zero trust military environments, I used Cloudflare
| tunnels to do edge integration in a seamless way for
| services, if you need more flexibility (zero trust clients
| and integrations) Warp is the way to go.
|
| The pattern I like is to shard customer data in D1+R2 based
| on a customer specific DO, and have that front your core
| services via tunnels, then have a shared state database
| fronted by hypertunnel. I like KEDA scaling of modular
| monoliths with Cloudflare containers as a burst fallback if
| SLAs are in danger of going red, it gives you resilience and
| scalability without boxing you into cloud specifics, and if
| you're going to be married to one cloud provider it should be
| Cloudflare, if they go down it's gonna be an internet wide
| thing.
| pjmlp wrote:
| What I actually miss in Vercel is the lack of exposure to the
| underlying AWS Lambda infrastructure, at very least similar set
| of languages should be supported.
| hunvreus wrote:
| Vercel does a ton of specialized work under the hood, not sure
| how much they could expose the underlying infra.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Easy, extend the list of options
|
| https://vercel.com/docs/functions/runtimes
|
| Go is in beta for years, for a company that depends so much
| on Rust tooling nowadays, I guess it would be about time that
| Rust would graduate out of a community runtime.
|
| Also, their containers are based on Amazon Linux 2023, so
| they could also extend the support there.
|
| https://vercel.com/docs/builds/build-image
|
| For me, I see that as they pivoted from the early days of
| multiple runtimes, are nowadays focused on nodejs and they
| kind of still support multiple runtimes, but are not keen on
| improving what is already there.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Interestingly, Vercel actually supports FastHTML.
| Experimentally, but it worked fine when I tried it.
| oersted wrote:
| This is a great opportunity to get HN's take on these tools:
| systems to streamline the management of containerized services
| deployed on self-managed hardware.
|
| We've been running both CapRover and Coolify for a couple years.
| We quite like renting real dedicated servers (Hetzner, OVH), it
| is so much cheaper than the cloud and a minor management burden.
| These tools make it easy to bridge the gap and treat these
| physical servers like PaaS.
|
| We have dozens of apps and services deployed on a couple large-
| ish servers with backups. Most modern back-ends do so little
| computationally and lots of containers can comfortably live
| together. 128GB of RAM and 64 cores can go a long way and
| surprisingly cheap in Hetzner, and having that fixed monthly cost
| removes a mental burden. It is cheap, simple and availability
| issues are so much rarer than people expect, maybe a couple
| mishaps a year that are easy to recover from and don't really
| have a meaningful impact for a startup.
|
| Coolify feels more complete and mature, but frankly, after using
| both a lot, we now steer more towards the simplicity of CapRover.
| I see that Dokploy is also a major alternative to Coolify, don't
| know much about it.
|
| How does /dev/push compare? Do you have any other recommendations
| in this vein? Or differing opinions on the tools I mentioned?
| hunvreus wrote:
| /dev/push is really trying to recreate the UX of Vercel, so
| more user-friendly/prettier than CapRover..?
|
| Additionally, for most cases you can select a runtime and
| deploy your app without any Docker config. Easier to get up and
| running if all you care about is deploy a Python/Go/Node.js app
| with simple requirements.
|
| I do plan on offering the ability to use custom Docker images
| soon though.
| imcritic wrote:
| I struggle to grasp what it does. What's Vercel and what that
| does? Someone here in the comments mentioned coolify.io and
| Dokploy as more alternatives. None of those projects have a good
| description of what they do. They just "ship anything to
| anywhere". That's too broad, I need details, I need a short
| explanation of their basic mechanisms.
|
| Tiresome!
| axpy906 wrote:
| Backend engineer here. I have no clue either. I think you're
| getting downvoted because it's easy to search?
| h4ch1 wrote:
| It says self-hosted PaaS everywhere on their sites, you're one
| Google search away from finding out what it is.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| If you're familiar with cPanel, these tools are basically
| cPanel for the 2020s.
|
| As a web developer, you develop your app on your computer
| (normally), but then folks can't actually access your app when
| it's running on your computer, it needs to be deployed to a
| publicly accessible web host.
|
| Basically, these tools run on your servers and give you nice
| front ends which allow you to build and host your web apps.
|
| Most of them integrate with your version control system so you
| can automatically build and deploy your app based on specific
| rules (often 'when main gets updated') or allow you to create
| preview deployments (if I merged my-feature-branch into main,
| what would my web app look like?)
|
| Coolify and Dokploy do this with containers, this tool
| apparently doesn't.
|
| Vercel, Netlify and others offer this as a service (you pay us
| $X per month and we manage it all for you), these tools run on
| your own server (either one you actually own or one you rent
| from a cloud provider).
| lloydjones wrote:
| How (if at all) does /dev/push fundamentally differ to Coolify?
| Or does it not, but it's just an alternative?
|
| (I saw the comment re: Streamlined UX, but is there anything
| else?)
| hunvreus wrote:
| The main difference is that you're just deploying apps, not
| containers (although I do plan on adding support for custom
| Docker images).
|
| Ultimately, I built this because I wanted the Vercel experience
| for Python apps.
|
| PS: it's built with FastAPI and HTMX (and Basecoat [1] which I
| created for this project).
|
| [1]: https://basecoatui.com
| lloydjones wrote:
| Okay, thanks for the info!
| tymonPartyLate wrote:
| Interesting tech choices. I am also always on the hunt for
| React alternatives. But the lack of type safety and static
| analysis usually leads to brittle templates. Stuff that could
| be expressed in verifiable code, is compressed in annotations
| and some custom markup. You need to manually re-test all
| templates when you make any change in the models. How do you
| deal with that?
|
| Btw, very cool project. Deployments for simple projects are a
| huge time sink.
| mclightning wrote:
| Vercel has been outdated for sometime and it is refreshing to see
| alternatives coming up. This one seems like superior to Vercel
| already, definitely worth the switch.
| hhthrowaway1230 wrote:
| I like it but I always miss features or defaults like: - internal
| network only with edge nodes (i.e tail scale out the box, + some
| edge nodes) - option to deploy on multiple servers to scale with
| super simple non k8s approach.
| hunvreus wrote:
| > - internal network only with edge nodes (i.e tail scale out
| the box, + some edge nodes)
|
| Can you help me understand that?
|
| > - option to deploy on multiple servers to scale with super
| simple non k8s approach.
|
| I'm working on that, allowing you to manage remote nodes from a
| single /dev/push instance.
| hhthrowaway1230 wrote:
| > Can you help me understand that?
|
| Like 10 nodes behind tailscale/wireguard in a private
| network, with only 2 nodes where you have a port open on
| 80/443, those are exposed to the public network. The rest of
| the nodes are all private like db, redis, etc etc.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I love devpu.sh and great that its getting traction
|
| I had known about this project beforehand and here is something
| that i found interesting I want to share more that they are
| written in htmx/python btw. This was the first time I saw
| somebody mention why on their reddit post in r/htmx and I
| actually saw that post out in the wild and It was a fun read and
| I might definitely try this out in the near future but I don't
| really know, I don't like UI's that much and I'd rather just
| deploy a container manually but their approach is really nice too
| and something that I want to try out in a hetzner vps one day for
| sure
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/htmx/comments/1ne6ueo/devpush_a_ver...
|
| Go star this repo or help them if you can! More the options the
| better (coolify,dockploy,devpu.sh) (to me personally devpu.sh
| seems the most minimalist with just python iirc)
| rohansood15 wrote:
| This looks really slick, though it's a bummer that there isn't a
| quick way to try the hosted version. You mentioned the Vercel UX
| in the comments, and I think the single-click install on the
| hosted version is a significant part of it.
|
| EDIT: Just got approved for access - thanks!
| baalimago wrote:
| Not sure why the comparison is to Vercel when it probably should
| be compared to Coolify/Dokploy
| macintux wrote:
| Perhaps because migrating from Vercel is a hot topic lately.
| mmargenot wrote:
| I like the idea of self-hostability, but not having to think
| about the deployment of the frontend piece has been a huge
| accelerant for me, someone who typically thinks only of ML and
| backend components.
| codegeek wrote:
| The UI looks very similar to the new UI recently released by
| Laravel Forge. Almost identical to be honest. Are you inspired by
| Laravel Forge ?
| hunvreus wrote:
| Oh yeah, I definitely took a lot of inspiration from it.
| skeledrew wrote:
| This looks like piku[0], but a deal more complex and limited to
| GitHub.
|
| [0] https://piku.github.io/
| hunvreus wrote:
| Very cool. I focused on building a web ui, but wanted to add a
| CLI, I'll definitely take some inspiration from that project.
| nisten wrote:
| Opens project supposed to automate typescript deployments...it's
| a bunch of python.
|
| So now I'll have TWO clusterfucks of infested dependencies to
| deal with instead of just one.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Everyone's listing their favorites in this space, so I'll list
| mine, Cosmos Cloud. Been solid so far for me. Even has no trouble
| with more complex docker compose-based applications like KASM
| workspaces (https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm / this does
| a docker inside docker sort of thing)
|
| Pasting the website instead of the GitHub as the installation
| instructions are more up to date on the main site:
|
| https://cosmos-cloud.io/
| pointlessone wrote:
| > Supported on Ubuntu/Debian.
|
| No debs. Install: curl | sh.
|
| facepalm-Picard.jpg
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| Interesting; some questions:
|
| 1. Is there a support for deploying into a multiple machines? If
| so, how does it work?
|
| 2. Where and how secrets are stored?
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