Show HN: Open source alternative to LaunchRock | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Open source alternative to LaunchRock

github.com

74 pointscodelitt11 comments

That's cool and was very much needed. Good thing they decided to go with Ruby, which makes it possible to run cheaply on Heroku.

For those looking for an even more simple solution to this problem (with less features, of course), buy a domain name, host an HTML page on Amazon S3 and use the Mailchimp form.

Very cool project OP.

@uniclaude: the HTML page on S3/CloudFront and MailChimp direction is built into my project called Gulp AWS Splash, which is another LaunchRock open source alternative at https://github.com/niftylettuce/gulp-aws-splash. I did a similar Show HN not long ago for this.

Adding in Heroku 1-Click Deploy and purify-css today!

Woahhh! That is awesome. Looks like you've put a lot of work into it.

You're absolutely right. You could. You could also use https://formspree.io/ which is quite good.

Wow, formspree looks even more hassle free than mailchimp for this purpose! Bookmarked!

If you're going to the trouble of setting up and deploying a Rails app, which you will then inevitably need to customise and style to match your content, how much more effort is it really just to start from scratch..? (Personally I'd probably use Sinatra for something like this and I would expect the front-end prettifying to take longer than the back-end...)

You're right. I think if I were to do it again I would use Sinatra. I built this a while ago. Live and learn.

I actually opened an issue here to discuss: https://github.com/codelitt/launchpage-rails/issues/9

Somebody with ruby knowledge could create a Docker image.

Yup. Here are Dockerfiles that should work for both the DB and the Ruby app (in their respective directories):

https://github.com/codelittinc/dockerfiles

Forgive me but why go after LaunchRock? It seems like the point of LaunchRock is to serve people who wouldn't have the tech skills (or desire) to deploy a Ruby app, or possibly even a static HTML app by themselves?

No intention to go after anyone. Yes, LR and this project serve completely different audiences. It was just the least-wordy way I could think of to describe it.

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