Ask HN: Best modern web stack for new self hosted projects

Hey HN,

I'm looking to develop several small, self-hostable apps, likely wrapped in Docker for easy deployment.

There needs to be API support, as well as front end support. It should be fast and reasonably lightweight to host on small servers (Raspberry Pis etc). I don't want to write a ton of boilerplate to get user registration, API keys, etc working.

I don't want to spend all day wrestling with types or memory management (looking at you Rust and Go). The code should ideally be somewhat approachable for other people to be able to contribute.

A million build dependencies is also undesirable so Node is probably out.

At this point I'm leaning towards just plain ol' PHP like Laravel.

Thoughts?