[imcritic]

I struggle to grasp what it does. What's Vercel and what that does? Someone here in the comments mentioned coolify.io and Dokploy as more alternatives. None of those projects have a good description of what they do. They just "ship anything to anywhere". That's too broad, I need details, I need a short explanation of their basic mechanisms.

Tiresome!

[d1sxeyes]

If you're familiar with cPanel, these tools are basically cPanel for the 2020s.

As a web developer, you develop your app on your computer (normally), but then folks can't actually access your app when it's running on your computer, it needs to be deployed to a publicly accessible web host.

Basically, these tools run on your servers and give you nice front ends which allow you to build and host your web apps.

Most of them integrate with your version control system so you can automatically build and deploy your app based on specific rules (often 'when main gets updated') or allow you to create preview deployments (if I merged my-feature-branch into main, what would my web app look like?)

Coolify and Dokploy do this with containers, this tool apparently doesn't.

Vercel, Netlify and others offer this as a service (you pay us $X per month and we manage it all for you), these tools run on your own server (either one you actually own or one you rent from a cloud provider).

[imcritic]

I have never had experience of configuring cPanel, I only used it, so my perception might be skewed, but the way I understand, cPanel has some built-in integrations with some common (open, 3rd-party projects) things like it supports a quite specific set of databases, supports a specific set of runtime frameworks (like PHP) and so on.

In contrast, this app's description states that it is for deploying your own apps. So does it have any integrations (like cPanel does) with anything? Or is it more like a CI/CD tool (think gitlab-ci or Jenkins)?

[d1sxeyes]

It varies. Coolify for example has installers etc. for various apps. This one I think is pretty much just CI/CD.

[h4ch1]

It says self-hosted PaaS everywhere on their sites, you're one Google search away from finding out what it is.

[axpy906]

Backend engineer here. I have no clue either. I think you’re getting downvoted because it’s easy to search?

[imcritic]

Search helps you find information, I searched and found only the descriptions of those projects and the problem is that all those projects have way too generalized descriptions, to the point where it's perceived as a noise, rather than as a signal.