What are your favourite stacks for personal projects?
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.
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.
Wait until you outgrow it and then consider something else.
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.
Drop a few php files under Apache and keep marching forward.
For APIs I either use Express if it's really small, or Django/Django Rest Framework/Postgres if I want something with admin pages.
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.
In general pick the tools you're better at.
Digital Ocean, PostgreSQL, nginx.
Pelican for static websites.
I'm really happy with this choice of tools.
Simple, powerful, elegant, extremely fast and productive, and is pure joy to develop!
I recently found out about http://www.ninjaframework.org/ which makes the process even faster.
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 certainly would be surprised if anything I ever worked on became the next big anything, and I have more side projects and half-baked plans than I will ever finish.