I tried deploying to a VPS without Docker... just to see how hard it is.

[@dreamsofcode]

Get your own VPS with 2 vCPU Cores, 8 GB RAM and 100 GB NVMe Disk space for just $5.99 per month with the KVM2 plan from Hostinger. Get an extra 10% off with the code DREAMSOFCODE by visiting hostinger.com/dreamsofcode

[@AlexScotton-Illizian]

Hot damn, that’s an amazing offer❤

[@crowdsec]

Hey thank you for checking us out! We realized that the install links in the readme were slightly outdated so we worked on refactoring this. Loved the video, a key takeaway I see is docker is great if you want to get started fast, but then the abstraction it provides can also impact how much you could learn by doing it the non docker way! - Laurence CrowdSec Support

[@wchorski]

Everyone should attempt to do this early on. Docker is nice but it abstracts away a lot of fundamentals. Once you do this you'll understand how to build Dockerfile(s) in a much more efficient way

[@dreamsofcode]

It was a really fun challenge! Definitely helped to learn a lot.

[@fikrirahmatnurhidayat4988]

A lot of engineers on my country doesn't understand Docker at all, or even terminal. Like what you do as programmer man lol. I'm about to leave my company, but every single engineers there doesn't understand Docker on fundamental level, let alone, k8s.

[@rd42537]

Most definitely great advice, I'm pretty OCD when it comes to my dockerfiles and have some really nice boilerplates as a result of knowing 'low level' sysadmin approaches. Ironically I did something very similar to this setup with a small vps recently, the only thing I'd change here is ufw in favor of nftables ... but it's negligible.

[@SeattleSpursFan1882]

Completely agree.

[@TyBohannon]

💯

[@NexusGamingRadical]

I've been deploying without docker outside work because honestly its just simpler to me and requires less steps. Only bit that really benefits from Docker in my eyes is CI/CD.

[@vaviloffx]

As always, amazing stuff! (The identical intonation in every sentence is killing me though haha)

[@americanbagel]

Why did you mention that?? Why?? Now I can't unhear it

[@brandonpark3893]

this is so awesome to see! i love how you edited this video with little things like the underlining, boxing animations, and making it a little more "fun", so my ADHD brain can focus a bit more. I really enjoyed how you tied in the different resources you tried and why or why not you went with them and the improvements section. I know for some, this is just knowledge they already have, but for newer people, this is invaluable! Just want to say thank you Elliott!

[@disjustice]

Remember when we had Tomcat and httpd and deploying a new version just involved pushing a .war file to a mvn repo? We even had these guys called sys-admins or operators who secured and configured the target platform for us... If you were lucky you even had this thing called a DBA who made sure the database was correctly configured and performant. As a backend dev, even logging into the production server used to mean I was having a really, really bad day, now it's just par for the course. Ah well.

[@peterszarvas94]

I am saving this video as a learning material. I did similar things but not this feature complete. Thanks!

[@madebylewis]

My day-to-day is the basic frontend/backend type workflow; your channel is my escape and hope that I keep chipping away at the layers to it all, and broaden my fundamental knowledge :)

[@dudu99200]

Great video, it's good to see the problems you encounter when doing it. It adds great value to the video because it's not just another generic tutorial

[@ebourgess]

This reminds me of my old job where we would use Capistrano to deploy Symfony apps, this brings back some memories, thanks for sharing this

[@reverse4646]

@@ebourgess what do you use now to deploy symfony webapps?

[@sarojregmi200]

Was setting up a vps for personal usages, and I never knew what were the things i was doing wrong. Thanks it will serve as a great learning resources.

[@aellionnecalara3223]

You can also manage user-level systemd services with `systemctl --user`. Great video btw!

[@husanaaulia4717]

@@aellionnecalara3223 i don't know what's wrong on my Linux, but services under --user somehow not automatically started system restart🤔

[@3nt3_]

@@husanaaulia4717 you have to use other targets than for system services

[@KadenCartwright]

@husanaaulia4717 they will not start until the user logs in after a reboot

[@Mankepanke]

​@@husanaaulia4717 they probably start when logging in

[@abeeinspace]

@@husanaaulia4717 User-level systemd units don’t restart with the system itself by design. They start when a user logs in and exit when the user’s session gets torn down by logind upon logout

[@Mr.BinarySniper]

Wow.. this is So awesome. I was also deploying application in Raw way. but now I learned a lots of thing to improve..

[@ZainSyed]

Genuinely a very good test. We haven't done automated releases as of yet. We do use systemd, php-fpm and nginx on our production servers but don't do rolling releases nor CI/CD for now. We're thinking of going to docker route.

[@sevos]

Nice to see such a detailed video about working with default tools in the stack

[@danygagnon8446]

This video is gold. I recommend looking into systemd sockets, timers and so on. There's so much going on and it is amazing. What I like about doing it this way is that you control all the permissions and networking stack, and you can work with the kernel directly

[@inithinx]

Now do it with NixOS!

[@joebeurg]

@@inithinx this one.

[@Mr.BinarySniper]

yeah. want a details video with NixOs.. 💯

[@ImperiumLibertas]

This is the way. Even if you use docker you can use nixos to provision the host is a consistent way. Nixos is an amazing tool.

[@inithinx]

Maybe use tools like terranix to deploy vps as well!

[@dustee2680]

NixOS is the easiest tho

[@mad_t]

It amazes me that all this stuff is like rocket science for modern devs.

[@blablabla-c5o]

wow. couple of my hair falls trying to imagining how difficult it is for you to do this. Well done boss

[@personalaccount1515]

Excellent video dude!

[@alpha210]

You didn't really touch on zero downtime deployment... I guess it was implied that having load balancing you can upgrade only one endpoint at a time and catch the failure early on ?

[@nothingtoseeherelolkek]

Thanks! I’m more of a mobile guy but can start some docker containers and make my own. I’m barely knowledgeable enough to be dangerous. This can make my backed tooling much better!

[@mjdmaxcoder]

I just started offering vps with support for automated builds, vpn, public/private network, monitoring. It was a great learning experience. Learnt a lot about kvm, ebpf, built my own vm scheduler etc. Next thing in mind is to learn more about hypervisors, followed by fpga programming.

[@thepi]

Amazing video! I always strayed away from deploying my services directly, due to my perceived complexity of it. This video certainly gave me some motivation to try something similar. I usually used either docker compose, or, more recently, podman kube. I am probably going to spend my weekend trying out ansible and trying to deploy something without using containerisation.

[@ivanmaglica264]

Wow, this is pretty much (except for GH actions) our workflow pre-2020. I'll stick to Docker, thank you very much.

[@nightwintertooth9502]

I had to write an entire shell script and powershell script on the deployment side as a controller just to get it to work. It wasn't fun so this is a good video.

[@Airprince4]

Thank you for being the only KZbinr who actually daily drives Zen Glad others actually appreciate the masterpiece that it is

[@gaetanlehmann2824]

A interesting video that remind me how we did things without docker - that was 10 years ago! In my opinion docker major impact has been to make the dev and prod environment much more alike, and thus reduce the amount of bad surprises when moving to prod

[@KaupoParmas]

Great content! Never done this kind of deployment myself and going through the docker video right now to learn some best practices there. Would love a monitoring video, seems like there are so many tools out there right now that could help with that so it's hard to choose something.

[@NoGoodNick_]

Would it be reasonable to use something like ansible to make the setup repeatable and documented?

[@__-se3tf]

yeah, I think reproducibility is the biggest flaw I’m seeing too.

[@ytdlgandalf]

Ansible is a false god.

[@NoGoodNick_]

@ what’s your preferred approach?

[@dreamsofcode]

Agreed. I did mention at the end that if this ever became default, using an automation tool (ansible, tofu, etc) would be a must. Going to do a video on one or many this year!

[@ytdlgandalf]

If it's it infra level I'd use something immutable or terraform/tofu. Because that at least does some state checking. Ansible is fire and forget and still allows for configuration drift. It's like we al forgot what a horrible shitshow it was without containers. Nobody said it was difficult to deploy on a VPs. It's also not difficult to make it a incomprehensible unicorn at day 2 or any following dat.

[@fadhilinjagi1090]

Ansible + pm2 (if you're deploying node). Ansible is a little slower than running commands yourself but a lot faster than debugging compose files, building, pushing to private registry and then pulling the huge docker images on the server and running them with docker compose.

[@shayes.x]

Docker has a rootless mode, which does have its limitations, but in general can allow you to achieve high security standards equally as effectively (albeit perhaps less simply or intuitively)

[@Deveyus]

"Adding in a load bearing sleep" hurts my soul. I've written them and it harkens to my own sins.

[@RuiPalmeira]

I mean, I'm sure you and OP know about this stuff... if that is one way of doing it and it works... even if it's not "elegant", who cares? 😆

[@Deveyus]

@@RuiPalmeira That is a dangerous general approach to things; elegance often doesn't have to do with just looking pretty, it's about making sure that things work as well as they can, because all of the small little things like this accumulate and build up over time and degrade your setups; but the you of the future does not know where all of these are and it really becomes a massive pain to solve later.

[@zz19991]

Caddy sounds great! I have been doings things in a similar way always, it seems the most logical/simple enough approach, you are aware of everything going on and don't have to reply on any third party (only the vps provider)

[@vishaldinesh]

Man you're quality is top notch

[@kiyov09]

Gold in the form of awesome content, as always!

[@Shenepoy]

I remember 4 years ago, I managed over 30 servers like this, and I just did a lot of cron jobs to do weekly, monthly status check and minor updates, and did templates for VMs to speed up any new deployment, at the end I created a janky way to use docker that works well enough without kubernetes a make it recover if an update caused any issues

[@_Mackan]

$17.99/mo for that vps without a 2 year contract is criminal

[@ShootingUtah]

Yeah but it ends up being under $150 for 2 years! If you had something running in GCP, even something EXTREMELY SMALL for 2 years you'll be spending more than that! Not to mention the risk of accidentally getting hacked and having someone mine monero on your system for $3800/hr. Don't ask me how I know! With this, even if the thing gets completely destroyed by hackers you're out $150 total! MUCH less risk especially for something that's not huge yet or never meant to make money.

[@manishprivet]

It's the best way to learn, Docker abstracts too many things. BTW, an improvement I would suggest is adding an `exit 1` when you are doing things like rollbacks. You want your CI to visibly fail when deployment was not successful.

[@BlurryBit]

"Docker abstracts too many things" - that''s a good thing in prod. That said, everyone should start with manual deployments before moving onto docker. Using docker without knowing the pitfalls is dangerous.

[@ShootingUtah]

I barely got my version of your docker example running! Haha now I'll have to redo everything without docker! By the way I used your link to Hostinger and I'm really happy with the product! I'm tempted to get another VPS without anything planned for it just to have one around.

[@paw565]

Wow! What an awesome and knowledge packed video.

[@codeman99-dev]

Thank you for checking out Caddy! Configuration that you can actually read in two months. No more "who the heck wrote this?!" ... "Oh wait, it was me!"

[@includenull]

8:05 Hey that's me! Great video as always!

[@RazoBeckett.]

Production Level ++

[@yigitorhan7654]

One idea while using containers, in order to still take advantage of user permissions, is to use rootless podman instead of docker inside of your "deploy" user and autostart it as a user daemon using the --user flag for systemctl.

[@ShootingUtah]

Maybe this is just me but I find this much easier to follow than the Docker version. I've got a Docker version running my react website with a Go server and honestly I think leaving Docker out might be the better way to go in a lot of ways. Especially having like a 1 minute CI/CD deploy time! That's huge!

[@manishprivet]

Unfortunately no, while the 1 min CI/CD looks attractive, the biggest problem Docker solves is 100% reproducibility. When doing VPS based deployment, you also want to maintain your VPS for security patches and stuff, e.g., running `sudo apt update` every once in a while. They can actually end up catastrophic as your main server also depends on those updates, and any wrong thing there can put down your server. Plus, if in any case your VPS is dead, or you want to migrate, setting these things up again can be a pain, especially if you are doing it some years later, where the Ubuntu you used before is out of support, or something like that.

[@ErikChacon]

Thanks!

[@dreamsofcode]

Thank you so much for the support! I really appreciate it. 💪

[@JSiuDev]

Have been using Hostinger, docker, Caddy for years. Docker simplify config backup and system migration.

[@Redyf]

Wake up babe, new Dreams of Code video just dropped!

[@Tristan-mr3pk]

I’ve done almost all of this. It’s a quite fun process!

[@hamzakhiar3636]

I love you, idk what to say I'm just thankful of your videos

[@CameraShounen]

A short video on using a secrets manager sounds interesting, I don't even know which options are popular nowadays (other than the cloud integrated ones of course)

[@sheldon98c]

I really miss my linux laptop. It broke last year and I'm forced to use company's macbook until I'm able to afford a nice laptop for myself. Seeing you using framework make me feel jealous 😅

[@peterszarvas94]

at least not windows

[@agustinmdq89]

Exciting video, a lot to learn! TY

[@BlurryBit]

I got the same message. Seriously considering switching to podman. Sure, I could use other tools like ansible or do it manually as well, but I prefer docker like environments specially for complex apps having multiple containers. It is a big hassle to maintain manually.

[@markoveselinovic2586]

LOVE CADDY

[@dreamsofcode]

Caddy is pretty dope ngl

[@trueberryless]

25:54 What is "zeng commit"?

[@dreamsofcode]

I'll have to do a video about it! Not trying to plug the course too much but it's something that's built in it to auto generate commit messages.

[@trueberryless]

@@dreamsofcode That would be awesome! ❤️ I saw, that the commit message seemed kinda too good to be true. And I can also imagine that zeng is well integrated with semver because it prefixes with feat: and maybe also fix: and such keywords. However after googling zeng I didn't find anything related.

[@trueberryless]

I hope it's not something like gh-commit or anything that necessarily needs an OPENAI_KEY because I don't want to integrate AI at such small levels in my workflow tbh...

To edit files that requires sudo powers you can use sudoedit.

[@sasonbraha4599]

Really great video. Learned a lot.

[@hxxzxtf]

Now another worthy challenge would be to do this in FreeBSD 14.

another great video! thank you buddy!

[@dreamsofcode]

Thank you!

[@santerisiiranen3924]

The deployment step could have been more cleanly solved by leveraging OCI-artifacts natively supported by ghcr. This would have allowed you to store and version control bare binaries of your application and handle them like you would handle (Docker) containers

[@EnhancedCookie]

Very nice! Any thoughts on how you would add a full database (e.g. postgres) into the mix? Use a hosted service of some kind, through an ssh tunnel? Self-host with periodic backups into something S3-like?

[@mintcar]

Going to be interesting to see how you did these steps. Maybe I'm weird but despite using Docker at work, I feel like I don't know it well enough to comfortably deploy personal projects that way. I just started with bash, systemctl and nginx with automated deploys through ssh in a gitlab pipeline the very first vps I obtained. With Docker, nothing is actually simpler than that unless you deploy someone else's container or follow a step by step guide, right? I think I will eventually start to containerize things when I understand the technology fully.

[@mintcar]

Some great tips especially around security. I think that deploying without docker starts to look really simple if you take away the requirement of rolling releases and rollbacks, which you don't really need if you don't have any users.

[@mikhailkalinin6484]

good teaching video. could you make another one under "how to automate configuration of the server" like using ansible, pupet or nixos to avoid manually operations

[@theblckbird]

Glad to hear, I wasn't the only one, who had Docker deleted by macOS

[@dreamsofcode]

Was kinda shocking when it popped up!

[@devlix-src]

It's a cool video, as usual the production level is off the charts! I did however enjoy the previous self hosting videos much more because they're actually applicable if you want to self host. This one was more of a thought experiment imo. I would have loved to see something on managing databases yourself on your self hosted service. This would provide much more value because you would learn the basics of self hosting including the database management/automation part. There are not many good tutorials on this as far as i know. Still thank you for making this video

[@dreamsofcode]

Managing databases is a great idea! Agreed, this one was more a "what if" I'm not sure I would recommend it over the other approaches that I took. That being said, Caddy is awesome and so was Crowdsec. I'll probably do some dedicated videos on them in the future.

[@Diego-Garcia]

As a lot of things... this was fun only because it was the first time doing it... Would recommend for personal projects, but never for it to be made in a company, that also would require you to document the entire environment for other person to work with.

[@sypoo2120]

cool video, you have done a great job!

[@vlmath314]

day to day work for a sysadmin or devops. thanks for the video ;)

[@nicolas_gama]

Great video but for a production ready application we forgot monitoring (or completely ignored?)

[@dreamsofcode]

Timing constraints. I've got a couple of monitoring videos coming soon!

[@AshishKumar-qi5gk]

The NOPASSWD trick was sweet.

[@Tantewillieja]

Almost all VPS providers support cloud config. This is just a simple yaml config which initiates the full vps with correct ssh settings etc. Great to quickly get to your preferred config.

[@Mooooov0815]

These deploy times! Our deployment pipeline from hell takes between 25 to 45 minutes to complete for a JS frontend

[@d0cx]

systemd services like we used to do before docker ?

[@SanderCokart]

Question: if your pc dies for whatever reason, and you cannot login via ssh, what do you do?

[@matgod2004]

1 - Have a backup of the private key. 2 - Cry. 3 - If the VPS service has some "Console Terminal" function like hypervisors/VMs, you may still login as root by console usually.

[@AmirparsaDD]

I might even do this for a serious project coming up!

[@yashramoliya4576]

Which linux distro are you using? Love to see a video on that. Thanks.☺

[@meka4996]

You are the MAN! Thanks

[@AniketBhatP]

No setting up a cert, or adding the dns plugin for cloudflare or creating automatic renewal scripts?? Caddy has gained another fan

[@rz2374]

where did you get that tmux notebook?

[@Redditor5000-gg5pv]

NixOS next?

[@dreamsofcode]

Yes!

[@syth-1]

Already a huge help, checked ny ssh logs and theres a huge list of connections - didnt think it was set to default (password auth on) when im using key based entry,

[@michaelns9887]

Please, also explain how to do PR previews

[@fxfighter]

The reduction in deployment time isn't insignificant. I took a look at the repo and the actual deploy times are sub 30s with the rolling deploy setup.

[@dreamsofcode]

Yeah, it's not huge. 10 minute deploys are still perfectly fine imho, but seeing it deploy in sub 1m is still great.

[@thellamahunter]

What is the screen behind Dreams of Code displaying?

[@panagiotispapaemmanouil7816]

That video was gold 🪙 Thank you!

[@rodemka]

for ssh as you are the only user better try port-knocking with iptables: - no dependencies - no cpu usage

[@bagfleet]

Great vid!

[@dreamsofcode]

Thank you!

[@shroomer3867]

23:30 please tell me that isn't the actual private SSH key

[@akbng]

Is that asciiquarium running on the background? And thanks for these videos, yt needs more vids on production ready deployments.

[@dreamsofcode]

It is! It's such a great backdrop

[@mikelinsi]

mvn build, scp push, ssh restart.... done no docker shit :D

[@MrJxtr]

Is Zenbin by any chance inspired by the Snippetbox app you build when following the Let's Go book? 👀

[@dreamsofcode]

I've not actually read that book so it would be a coincidence!

[@MrJxtr]

@@dreamsofcode The concept is the same but yours is probably more thorough... but I saw a code snippet from your video and it looks like you are using templ? the book only uses the stdlib for templating.

[@jonnyso1]

I always found docker to be an annoying middleman, it has its use cases but I find it kinda baffling that its the default way to do it nowdays. If I had a lot of dependency constraints and or had to deal with a lot of different version of my toolchains then I'd probably reach for it more often. I'm actually quite behind on the whole CI/CD thing because at the scale I've been working I never needed it, configure the server once, push code, just works.

[@OldKing11100]

I think I'm too scared of becoming reliant on GHA or at least that's what I tell myself. I just use precommit to test locally and postcommit hooks to deploy using ssh and update script. For Golang I think it's fine to use git and build on the VPS as only the first build consumes a lot of resources. Restart to Status takes a bit under 3 seconds on a bad day for me.

[@alcymn]

Babe, put on the new Dreams Of Code

[@rural_nerd]

The banana cursor is hilarious

[@betterwithmaul]

me just like this for deploy my rust-api ssh remote to vps via github ci -> pull latest change -> build the app -> stop systemd service -> copy new build binary -> restart systemd service -> done

[@leel2]

15:24 Bro is using GPT 4o MINI and was expecting working output haha