I am developing a platform, the details don’t matter, but it’s a system the hosts personal data. As a result, I want to avoid hosting users in any way, and I am trying to make it as easy to self-host as possible.

I have some experience self hosting applications and I have some intuuition what to do or don’t, but I wanted to see if I can pull from the collective wisdom.

Got any good resources to share? Any tips? Or, maybe some bad experiences or things to avoid?

  • mox
    1•4 months ago

    Supporting SQLite as an option for people with modest needs is not a bad idea. As long as you keep your SQL simple and avoid vendor-specific extensions, adding support for it at any point shouldn’t be difficult.

    Providing a Docker config is fine, but I would never lean on it as a substitute for conservative dependency choices and good build scripts. Many people don’t use it and never will. If you instead design your software to be easily built/installed/packaged natively for any distro, then it will reach more users, and as a side effect, will also be easy to package for just about any container system (Docker, Kubernetes, LXC, etc.)