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Ask HN: Go-to web stack for 1-person startup

3 pointsjcpst8 comments

I spent the morning just overwhelming myself with the possibilities.

I want to strike the right balance of leveraging SaaS and cloud, while avoiding being locked into a particular cloud provider.

If you need to set up a production-ready web app with auth{n,z}, accounts- what are the first tools you consider? More interested in folks thoughts than solutioning anything particular for myself.

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The stack you already know and are comfortable with. For me, that's unquestionable Groovy & Grails, but for somebody else, the answer could be completely different. For the auth stuff, I default to using CAS. Again, just because I know it and am familiar with it, not because it's necessarily objectively "better" than the other choices.

Next.js, because that's the easiest way to create a full-stack React project, with great hosting options (Vercel or self-hosted).

Auth via Keycloak or similar.

Postgres DB.

Everything dockerized.

CI/CD (I like Gitlab, Github is cool too).

I'd put Firebase in there instead of Postgres, Keycloak, dockerization etc, simply because for a startup, speed is everything. One can migrate later if they actually have enough revenue and users.

This is what I did:

.NET Core (because I knew .NET), Razor pages. Plenty of recipes on the next for integrating with 3rd party auth.

AWS because I had credits.

Docker for deployment to ECS (initially started on Elastic Beanstalk though).

I do use some AWS specific services (DynamoDB,Lambda,S3,AuroraDB) but as a single person startup I wanted to avoid as much maintenance / backup stuff as I could.

GitHub for source code control. Some use of GitHub actions.

VSCode for editing/debugging. JetBrains Rider is really nice though. Android Studio for the app.

Dev workstation: Linux or WSL2. Moved all the CI/CD stuff to makefiles or used GitHub actions. I found it more productive to ignore all the wizards and whatnot and learned the CLI for AWS and .NET. Android Studio is much nicer on Debian than it is in Windows.

For security: Tailscale.

For developement and testing: bought my own S/H server.

I would take a look at Laravel. It has built in auth{n,z} options and you can deploy it easily with Laravel Forge sass that can deploy to multiple cloud providers using boring MySQL, Postgres and redis. And you still retain control of your infrastructure on the cloud provider. You can also develop locally using laravel sail docker dev environment.

Whatever framework and language you know best, with however best you know how to deploy.

If you have previous projects from which you can copy and paste code, it's not even a question, IMO.

What do you know best? What's your past experience? Are you more of a "backend" person or "frontend" dev, or are you experienced at both things?

Nuxt

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