Deploying stuff can suck

A long, long time ago I remember working on a tool ‘FOO’ that was used by one of the biggest automotive companies in the world. FOO had been developed and maintained for almost a decade when I joined the team.

At that point, the automotive company had started to abide to higher security standards and FOO was constantly flagged and it was not possible to actually upload a new version through normal means.

The crafty people in the team came up with a smart way to circumvent this though: they would access the server where FOO was running, directly and simply manipulate the files directly.

Awesome.

Every now and then FOO would crash and burn. Didn’t really matter all that much though, as barely anyone was still using it anyway.

The typical web developer experience

To be honest, as primarily a web developer I’ve been spared having to deal a lot with actually deploying stuff.

I normally just write code and once my changes are reviewed and accepted, a new build is automatically created and deployed on the server.

Actually setting this sort of stuff up oneself, can be quite annoying though!

The primitive way

For personal projects I tended to use uberspace. I liked how they not just provide you with a vServer, but also give you a set of tools to manage your server. They really want to teach you to get comfortable with server administration - not that I ever got to that point.

Recently I worked on a new personal project and my workflow was the following:

1. make changes and merge it to the main branch
2. build the main branch locally
3. sftp the build files locally to the server

I also automated step 2 and 3 with a small shell script. I guess I also could have automated this further with some github actions.

This sucks though - I don’t always want to do this manually. There is also no backup - no nothing.

As I was maintaining multiple projects, I was slowly running into higher costs as well. That’ why I was looking for new options.

The cool way

Cheaper than €5/monthly per project is to host all projects on one singular vServer e.g on hetzner.

Coolify is a pretty cool open-source tool that helps developers like me streamline this deployment process. It is basically a self-runnable cloud provider :)

Hetzner even provides a possibility to setup a vServer immediately with Coolify out-of-the-box!

After connecting it to my private Github account, it’s super easy to setup new projects and host them on this server :)

Now my workflow works the following way:

1. make changes and merge it to the main branch

That’s it :D

Awesome. Pretty cool. I love it!