Small personal projects have very different requirements than full commercial applications. Ideally they are easy to get set-up in a weekend or two, are enjoyable to produce, require very little maintenance, and are easy on the wallet.<p>What are your favourite stacks for personal projects?
Java or Python (or occasionally C#).<p>Why do I need a 'stack' for a personal project ? Also, a weekend-or-two to set-up ?!? If it takes longer than 30 minutes to get going, it's not going to happen.
As someone who is deep into fancy Javascript stuff (React/Redux/Webpack you name it) at this point I would say PHP7!!<p>There is something special about being able to create a helloworld.php and have it sit there up and running with reasonable performance without issues so you can forget about it.<p>Wait until you outgrow it and then consider something else.<p>I regret wasting so much time (and trust me I'm no noob in this) setting up boilerplate dev environments file watchers transpilers hot module reload nginx reverse proxy server-side rendering server REST API layer client side routing graceful reloading blah blah blah.<p>Drop a few php files under Apache and keep marching forward.
Usually React, using this boilerplate: <a href="https://github.com/davezuko/react-redux-starter-kit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/davezuko/react-redux-starter-kit</a> which has Webpack and testing already set up.<p>For APIs I either use Express if it's really small, or Django/Django Rest Framework/Postgres if I want something with admin pages.
Ruby on Rails + PostgreSQL hosted on digitalocean. I have written a chef cookbook that helps me configure basic server security and install Rails/Nginx/PostgreSQL with just one command. The automated server setup took around 15 minutes then I can deploy my app to it.
I'm a dinosaur - I'm still partial to the venerable PHP, SQL, and Regular Old Javascript.<p>Although I did teach myself how to develop in Hack through Vagrant on Windows, and I kind of prefer Hack to PHP for the XHP extension alone.
If you don't need a database or a dynamic interface, I have a personal site running with Jekyll. It's static and cost a few cents a month to run on Amazon S3 (until I actually get some traffic). Github Pages is also an option if you are going this route.
Ruby or Ruby on Rails, because they're the ones I'm more proficient in. I did very small projects in Node and Elixir and I would like to become better at Elixir. But the time for personal projects is small so productivity is super important.<p>In general pick the tools you're better at.
Django, HTML/SCSS/jQuery, Zurb Foundation,<p>Digital Ocean, PostgreSQL, nginx.<p>Pelican for static websites.<p>I'm really happy with this choice of tools.<p>Simple, powerful, elegant, extremely fast and productive, and is pure joy to develop!
Java (+ GWT for the web)<p>I recently found out about <a href="http://www.ninjaframework.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ninjaframework.org/</a> which makes the process even faster.
Coffeescript, Flask or Bottle, Heroku. Maybe Firebase if I need a database.<p>Or if I don't need anything dynamic, Hakyll (Pandoc integrated!), and GitLab Pages (automatic CI deploy via any docker instance from git push).
I tend to use Perl (generally via CGI::Application, but more recently with Dancer / Mojolicious). For databases I use MySQL and Redis for caching.