Ask HN: How do you self-host your apps?

2 pointsblindlobstar9d ago2 comments

Hello everyone!

I'm looking for feedback from people who selfhost their own environment.

I'm building a tool to simplify deployment and management and make it feel more like a PaaS. I was also frustrated by the speed of CI/CD runners.

Here's what I've settled on:

- Docker compose files to describe services

- Docker swarm as an orchestrator

- One command to setup a new server and add it to cluster

- Secrets and server credentials are encrypted with age and stored inside the repository alongside the code

- Easy way to add secrets and config files to your service

I built it initially for myself, so I'm probably missing some pain points other teams have. A few questions for anyone running their own infra:

1. What's the orchestrator you're using - k8s, docker swarm, etc.? Or none at all?

2. How do you manage secrets?

3. Where do you store images - self-hosted registry, GHCR/Docker Hub or no registry at all?

4. How long does your CI/CD pipeline take end to end?

5. What's the size of your team?

Anything you wish existed but doesn't? Or anything I'm clearly getting wrong?

2 comments

you might look at this for feature ideas.

tldr; We built an open-source, MIT-licensed PaaS that:

Lets you scale beyond a single server.

Uses API keys for team access, not SSH keys.

Has a simple CLI and web UI without overwhelming configuration.

Includes built-in database management (disco postgres create).

Is funded by optional managed services, so that the code can remain free and open.

Dokku: Great, but locked us to single servers and required managing SSH access for teams.

Coolify: Powerful, but we found the sheer number of configuration options overwhelming.

Kamal: Brilliant for deployment, but we wanted integrated database management and other platform features built-in.

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