I'm surprised that Caddy (<a href="https://caddyserver.com/" rel="nofollow">https://caddyserver.com/</a>) hasn't been mentioned yet. While I'm not entirely happy with the business direction it's been moving in, it's arguably much easier to use than nginx, doesn't require a container, and also automatically sets up TLS ("SSL") out of the box.<p>It doesn't provide a panel, but arguably once you reach a scale where you want to run >1 instances, you're probably going to want to go beyond a default configuration anyway, and use some configuration that's more tailored towards your usecase.<p>As a point of criticism towards this project in particular: the README makes it sound like it'll magically scale up your application, but it makes absolutely no mention of how to handle state (eg. your database) in that scenario. Spawning new instances (which this project does) is the <i>easy</i> part of scaling, the difficult part is state management and it doesn't address that at all.<p>As a completely unrelated piece of advice, just because this is mentioned in the README: <i>do not</i> under any circumstances make use of domain registration deals that drop the price for a common TLD like .com below $7 or so. There's a certain fee that the registrar has to pay to the TLD registry per domain, and if the registrar is charging you less than that, that means they're getting the money from somewhere else - often through hidden upsells, exorbitant renewal fees, convoluted transfer systems that try to lock you in, or other customer-hostile schemes.
I like the idea. It’s great that it makes deploying small side projects easier. However, I am very wary of the fact that it seems to use a Node based HTTP server. Wouldn’t it be far more performant and secure to build this kind of tooling on a wide spread HTTP server such as Nginx or Apache?<p>Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against Node. Hell, I use it on a daily basis. But I wouldn’t run a Node based server and expose it to the internet. That’s a bit too high risk for me.
Why doesn't the installation prompt you to set up a password? Firing up a server with a default password has been a really bad choice for over a decade...
Wondering how this container with the included Letsencrypt will update the SSL cert after three months when deployed on multiple machines (which is a tricky task).
Honestly the writing style of the readme really doesn't inspire confidence, and "easy" seems like a really bad metric to measure how good something that should be performant, reliable and secure.
Moved to Show HN:
I opened sourced the platform that I made to serve my personal side projects. It's basically an open source version of Heroku. Similar to Dokku, except it comes with Free SSL certificate support, clusing support, web interface and etc. Let me know what you think :)
I didn't dive deep, but I like how this is <i>some</i> batteries included, and is tailored to web apps and nothing else.<p>It makes me think of how webpack won the builder/packer battle against gulp and grunt by assuming you're building a <i>web</i> app, and want typical web stuff.<p>Just like you <i>could</i> use gulp to build a C++ app but nearly everybody uses it for the web, you <i>could</i> use Docker for hosting an IRC server but nearly everybody uses it for the web.
I almost missed the part about it being GUI because I rarely play youtube videos. I did not expect it being a GUI tool! Nice!<p>A small suggestion - maybe show a GIF with a few screens from the app instead of a video? So that when someone opens the repo he gets a little preview of whats inside?
Not a fan of so much GUI interaction, but very nice.<p>If you want to the slightly harder way (with less moving pieces), I highly recommend docker-compose + traefik (does the LE and proxying and subdomain) and a learning how to create a simple dockerfile either of the languages.
Great job, looks cool!<p>How does it compare with UCP ?<p><a href="https://docs.docker.com/datacenter/ucp/2.2/guides/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.docker.com/datacenter/ucp/2.2/guides/</a>
Edit: turns out it's just a little harder to find.<p>Original text:
I'm not the target market at all, but it's hard to trust a project that relies on Docker but doesn't have the Docker configuration in the repo.
This is great - you write with accessible and encouraging language. I noticed a lot of typos in the demo app and in the README - you would be well-served getting a proofreader to polish it up.
I've used something similar before, gave up on it. I just use Nginx manually now, so much more room for customization, plus I know where everything is because I set it up.
This seems great, will definitely give it a shot. One question: what about databases ? Can it handle that part too or do I have to manually set them up ?
I love the effort here, I didn't expect the Web GUI here and it really saves a ton of time to quickly setup a test environment!<p>Will you also add a database?