Ask HN: Which stack is as boring (good boring) and cheap in 2023 as PHP?

Learn Laravel. I use it on all my personal projects.<p>I have a boring webhost which is sat behind Cloudflare. I push my code up to Gitlab and have a simple deployment script set up which automatically SSH&#x27;s into my webhost and pulls down my latest changes.<p>Laravel allows to me dev locally with ease and makes common tasks like form validation, db migrations and various other things a breeze. When I&#x27;m done I merge to main, `git push` and my changes are live. It&#x27;s great.<p>If you have some experience with PHP and have been a web developer for some time you&#x27;ll have no problem picking up Laravel. I&#x27;ve always found the docs to be great and it&#x27;s very intuitive to work with.<p>Some years ago I was a PHP dev, but professionally I tend to work with Node, Java and Kotlin these days. I wouldn&#x27;t use any of them for personal projects though. I find I&#x27;m far more productive in Laravel and the ecosystem is mature enough that I know anything I write will be good for years. Plus, deployment is cheap and simple. I pay a fix price (around $100 a year) for my webhost and for that I get &quot;unlimited&quot; domains, storage and DBs. It&#x27;s a bit slow on it&#x27;s own, but behind Cloudflare it works great.<p>PHP is super underrated imo. It&#x27;s perfect for small - medium sized projects on a budget!

Maybe it isn’t boring enough for you, but now I start all my projects with Next.js using its serverless features. It’s probably because I’m proficient with JavaScript and TypeScript.<p>If you don’t like&#x2F;need React for frontend, you can just use the serverless part (I do it for some API-only projects). The deployment is very easy with Vercel (also possible at other places but I’ve never tried).<p>But, if you need some advanced backend features (similar to ActiveRecord for instance), maybe you should stick with Rails or Laravel.

I don&#x27;t understand why Rails, Django, Elixir (Phoenix presumably) etc don&#x27;t cut it for an MVP, what&#x27;s your rationale for this statement? They&#x27;re often lauded as pretty good batteries-included frameworks.

&gt; should I just &quot;undust&quot; my PHP and learn Laravel?<p>Definitely not a bad idea. Php has come a long way while composer and laravel has made dev a breeze.<p>You&#x27;re absolutely right in picking up a good old boring stack and LAMP still rocks.<p>Also do explore laravel jetstream &#x2F; interiajs if you get a chance.

PHP, without Laravel, without any framework. There&#x27;s a bit more work in some areas (you have to think about sessions and cookies and stuff), but it&#x27;s amazing how quickly you can code without a framework that <i>REALLY</i> wants to be a cooking recipe site (or any generic &quot;CRUD&quot; site) getting in the way.<p>Also don&#x27;t throw away heroku&#x2F;fly.io&#x2F;vercel&#x2F;docker&#x2F;kubernetes yet, PHP works great on all of those.

The answer is PHP or Rails, just like its been the last 10+ years.<p>Anyone who suggests Go is severely out of touch. It&#x27;s a great language sure but for a webapp MVP it&#x27;ll just be a waste of time. I would even doubt any flavor of JS or Python could match what PHP and Rails have done for rapid web development.<p>I&#x27;m not familiar with Laravel but that seems like the natural next thing if you want to use PHP

I&#x27;m going to give an unpopular (in the sense of raw user numbers) suggestion: Swift deployed to AWS Lambda.<p>You can use a shared database, deployment is easy, the language is pleasant and fast. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.swift.org&#x2F;server&#x2F;guides&#x2F;deploying&#x2F;aws-sam-lambda.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.swift.org&#x2F;server&#x2F;guides&#x2F;deploying&#x2F;aws-sam-lambda...</a>

aws, go, and clojurescript.<p>go is notoriously boring.<p>the reagent api for clojurescript hasn’t changed in a decade, though recent things like shadow-cljs do improve qol.<p>aws releases services with 2 in their name instead of changing existing ones. the old boring service will plod along forever.<p>aws apigateway v2 is much better, but i have many deployed projects i will never migrate because they are fine on v1.<p>i do it like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nathants&#x2F;aws-gocljs">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nathants&#x2F;aws-gocljs</a>

What problem are you trying to solve that Rails&#x2F;Django, Flask, Elixir, or Spring couldn&#x27;t solve?

For projects with no income and need time to iterate, particularly if not a full-time thing, I’ll sleep comfortably (i.e. enjoy the boredom) of using AWS CloudFront, S3 static hosting and API Gateway with direct integrations (to SQS, DynamoDB, and Step Functions). Literally zero maintenance, essentially zero cost while developing and at low volumes, and will scale-up automatically if&#x2F;when getting traction.

Boring stacks are nice for low features. I find the advanced tools works for things with a lot of edge cases.<p>To use an analogy, you can use PHP to build the Empire State Building, just not some of the other sexy glass skyscrapers. React is great for things like Twitter and FB which want to feel lively. PHP works perfect for things that are well, &quot;semi-duplex&quot;.

Why doesn&#x27;t Rails qualify as boring?

2nd this:<p>if you already know PHP:<p>* PHP with a mature and well documented framework like laravel<p>if you already know python<p>* python with django :)<p>but imho. the deployment of python webapps in general - regardless if you use django&#x2F;flask&#x2F;... - is sadly a bit of a pain compared to the ease of PHP...

Yes Laravel! Its whole purpose is to easily setup quick prototypes that are highly scalable.<p>Also, Taylor Otwell is incredibly brilliant, and his code reflects it.

There is the feeling that tools have gotten worse over time that complexity has snuck in and older ways were better. That&#x27;s true but it&#x27;s because you have to deliver more complex solutions now. Expectations have increased.<p>The simplest experience for me would be ASP on .net. It&#x27;s boring, mature and quick.<p>But if you know PHP just go with PHP. Laravel is great.

I feel like I look for different things when I’m thinking “boring”. I would rather use .Net or Java for one simple reason - I know I won’t be rewriting the whole thing in a year when the ecosystem has suddenly shifted to the Next Big Thing, which seems particularly prevalent in the JS&#x2F;TS&#x2F;Node arena.

What does cheap mean when you&#x27;re picking between different free languages and frameworks?

- Whatever you know best - Whatever has the most amount of batteries included

Pocketbase and go is a nice compromise. You just rsync the compiled binary.

Totally forgot about what I really like:<p>Quarkus with kotlin.<p>Kotlin makes so much more fun than java, runs on JVM too. Unfortunately it adds a kotlin complexity layer over quarkus which can add issues

Servlets without Spring, just add Apache commons dbcp. Jetty + Postgres + HAProxy.

Laravel (php) or Rails (ruby).

Remix Run

Puh PHP is still super shitty.<p>Alone debug support on any Jim based language is so much better.<p>I would still recommend spring boot with normal pages (templated) so no frontend ja stuff. That should be the easiest and best supported stack.<p>I would also still do cloud native.<p>Configuring, upgrading, monitoring etc is so much easier with some cheap k8s behind it (managed by argocd).<p>Database: managed postgres.