Show HN: DeploySolo – The SaaS boilerplate for engineers. (Pocketbase/ Htmx)

[mannders]

https://deploysolo.com/

Golang is an incredible language for web development. That being said, indie developers and small businesses will likely miss extensive resources found in other projects like Django. Although building an application from the ground up using the standard library is possible, it can be error prone and time consuming.

Pocketbase has almost everything an indie developer needs, supporting database, authentication, and file storage into a single, easy-to-deploy executable. Combined with HTMX, and you can created a full stack web application without bloated front end frameworks. That being said, its a relatively new project, without extensive hands on resources for new developers to dive in and create full projects.

This is why I'm building DeploySolo. On the surface, its a SaaS boilerplate carefully crafted to leverage the best of these technologies. Looking further, it is my mission to create cook books and resources for indie hackers and small businesses to build real world apps using this stack without feeling lost.

[android521]

hwo does an ad gets to the top page and has been staying there for a while??? what hacks they do to make it beat other organic contents?

[mannders → android521]

I'm just building in public. I don't think there's any hacks.

[tamimio]

Any working demo for that boilerplate?

[anonzzzies → tamimio]

Yep, upvote for this. As even if there is a refund within a week, I don’t really want to do that unless I can test it.

[mannders → tamimio]

I will get one up and running in the next day or two. Its literally as simple as getting a domain, booting up a server, downloading the exe, and running one command, even with HTTPS certificates.

Thanks for the tip.

[cweagans → mannders]

Even though Pocketbase is simple to get up and running, I'd have a hard time dropping $50 sight unseen. There's no screenshots or demos or anything. I'm interested, but that's really what's missing to get me to commit.

Hope this helps (and hope you have a demo and/or screenshots or something up soon!). Sounds like a really interesting project.

[mannders → cweagans]

Live demo has been put with a button on the front page. Thanks for the feedback!

https://deploysolodemo.com/

[kixpanganiban]

The value proposition of this, especially at the price, is very weird. how is this better than putting together a python-cookiecutter template with pocketbase, htmx, and stripe?

[mannders → kixpanganiban]

I would say that making a python-cookiecutter template would just be a different delivery method for the same underlying value.

The underlying value of DeploySolo is that it is a complete SaaS template integrating a unique combination of tech that I haven't seen before in a complete package yet.

It comes out of the box integrated with:

1. Auth cookie storage with vanilla js (avoiding front end frameworks)

2. Stripe webhooks setup so you only have to generate product IDs and secrets, and simply place it in the code.

3. UI elements/pages from tailwind, serving as a minimal foundation for your own tailwind styles.

4. An extremely sane and pleasant templating system using Go's html/template. You can effectively reuse html fragments as components, but output simple pages. If you need dynamic interactivity, htmx fits into this beautifully.

Of course its possible to set up all these things yourself, but all in it took me two months of early mornings.

If you're a busy adult, starting with a complete package like this could be the difference between success and never launching at all, weighed down by complexity.

[mannders → mannders]

This is in addition to the educational content I'm going to be creating around this topic. While building DeploySolo, I spent 50% of my time reading source code and 50% in GitHub discussions.

Its a skill that engineers should develop to be comfortable with these resources.

But having tutorials and cookbooks that help achieve a user's specific goal is extremely helpful for the new engineer or the time conscious one.

I attribute a lot of Django/Laravel's popularity to these resources, that are currently missing in the Go/Pocketbase ecosystem.

[usernamed7]

My biggest complaint is that your copy (here, and on the site) uses delusional and grandiose language. Which shows me that you're just full of it. And surprise: people don't buy from people they don't trust.

and then there's this BS from the site:

>Its core, written in pure Golang, is of exceptional quality. Golang is esteemed for its productivity, simplicity, safety, and portability. With Pocketbase, your app—including public files—can be compiled into a single static binary deployable on any server, epitomizing true vendor independence.

The only thing this epitomizes is a solution in search of a problem.

Also from the site:

> Frameworks like Django and Rails offer pre-packaged solutions for common issues such as user authentication and template rendering, liberating developers to concentrate on solving business problems. They’re great for indie developers and integrate well with HTMX. However, there’s a caveat: over time, your expertise may become confined to the Python or Rails ecosystems.

What is this dribble? So the large and well documented python/rails ecosystems are bad, but using a boilerplate written by some guy is somehow better?

It's cool that you built something. It's absurd that you're trying to sell it to developers as "the SaaS boilerplate for engineers".

It is clear you do not understand the audience you are trying to sell into. You don't understand their pain, and you don't understand how they make decisions.

[mannders → usernamed7]

Simply put, I found deploying a Django app on an EC2 instance to be a huge pain. Getting letsencrypt certs through nginx, setting up routes to a unix socket, choosing between WSGI and ASGI. Docker compose can help orchestrate these processes more easily, but its still a non-trivial amount of complexity. This isn't a documentation problem, but a personal distaste for the architecture.

This is the problem your first quote actually solves. I didn't fabricate a fake problem, I felt a real one.

Deploying a pocketbase application is as simple as getting a binary on a server with a HTTPS configured firewall, and giving it a domain name. I launched both deploysolo.com and deploysolodemo.com in a tmux instance, which isn't a great permanent solution, but a testament to ease of deployment for a market validation phase.

The "for engineers" generally comes from the fact that many web software engineers enjoy the Go ecosystem, and they can take a lot of their expertise creating HTTP routes into a SaaS boilerplate that solves common problems out of the box. Reinventing the wheel sucks when you have a business idea to get out into the world.

Anyway truly thank you for the feedback, I'm still learning and not trying to use grandiose language to extract money. I'm just trying my best to create something that helps people create their own value.

[clarkmcc]

Is this just kind of like a GitHub repo template basically?

[Onavo]

Does pocketbase support auth refresh tokens?

[mannders → Onavo]

Pocketbase doesn't maintain separate refresh and access tokens. Credit to the discussion behind this can be found here: https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/discussions/2154#di...

This is essentially because Pocketbase commits to being a monolithic architecture. There's no need to pass around auth status to different microservices, because all relevant services are accessible locally.

It doesn't even store the auth tokens themselves on the server, as the clients are expected to store and handle them, which eventually do expire.

TL:DR, having a long lived refresh token is not more secure than just having a long lived auth token in the first place.

The pocketbase monolithic architecture is one of the primary reasons I am so excited about this technology. No it isn't appropriate where horizontal scaling is mission critical, but for the indie developer projects, having more microservices than users is just complexity for no reason.

[_virtu → mannders]

Re the monolith vs micro service problem; this is why I love elixir and Phoenix.

[aitchnyu → mannders]

Wonder if there is auth/SSO/WAF at reverse proxy level? For example Nginx would serve mydjangoapp.site.com and gitlab.site.com and gatekeeps users and services like a monolith.