lwc VS Dokku

Actually I was wondering if lwc oss is still a thing. The website lwc.dev looks like it hasn't been updated since the release in 2019. Are many people using it or was it a nice try by Salesforce but can we consider it dead? I know of course it can't compete with react, vue or angular, but has it built a nice user base around it to keep it interesting?

Web component browser APIs aren't that many, and not that hard to grasp (if you don't know about them, have a look at Google's Learn HTML section and MDN's Web Components guide); but creating a web component actually requires taking care of many small things. This is where web component libraries come in very handy, freeing us of having to think about some of those things by taking care of them for us. Most of the things I'll mention here are handled one way of another by other libraries (GitHub's Catalyst, Haunted, Hybrids, Salesforce's LWC, Slim.JS, Ionic's Stencil) but I'll focus on Google's Lit and Microsoft's FAST here as they probably are the most used web component libraries out there (ok, I lied, Lit definitely is, FAST not that much, far behind Lit and Stencil; but Lit and FAST have many things in common, starting with the fact that they are just native web components, contrary to Stencil that compiles to a web component). Both Lit and FAST leverage TypeScript decorators to simplify the code even further so I'll use that in examples, even though they can also be used in pure JS (decorators are coming to JS soon BTW). I'll also leave the most apparent yet most complex aspect for the end.

Now in Alba’s role, she and her team use Lightning Web Components (LWC) to create custom user interfaces, a framework based on Web Components standards. With LWC, Alba creates components using modern, standard JavaScript. This means the skills that she learned previously are transferable to other JavaScript-based technologies. She pointed out that on top of this transferability, LWC is open source, and developers can use it outside of the Salesforce platform. Components can be used in Lightning App Builder and published on the AppExchange for other customers to use them.

Lightning Web Components (LWC) from Salesforce are based on standard Web Components built using HTML and JavaScript. They are lightweight, easy to build, and perform well in modern browsers. When building LWCs, you’ll become familiar with the concept of composition: piecing together simple building-block components within the body of a more complex component.

Indeed. Ever built anything in LWR+LWC opensource? It's opensource where you don't get to open its source. Most of the documentation is a mess between outdated Aura components and their new lwc.dev site which has like 2% of the material you actually need.

If you want to use LWC outside of Salesforce to build a website, check out LWC OSS

Salesforce developed Lightning Web Components (LWC) as a fast, enterprise-grade wrapper around vanilla web components. LWC is built on the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that powers the web, so any analyzer for those languages can be applied here.

Would be great to see a comparison to some better known alternatives like

- Dokku [0]

- CapRover [1]

[0] https://dokku.com/

[1] https://caprover.com/

If you want to dig into it anyways, Dokku is an interesting mention. They provide an Open Source PaaS that you can install on your server to simplify self hosting containers.

When I came across Coolify, I thought of giving it a try. I am aware of Dokku, but I never really tried it because it doesn't have a UI. I work primarily as a UI developer, so having a nice UI to work with is a plus for me.

I run all my projects on Dokku. It’s a sweet spot for me between a barebones VPS with Docker Compose and something a lot more complicated like k8s. Dokku comes with a bunch of solid plugins for databases that handle backups and such. Zero downtime deploys, TLS cert management, reverse proxies, all out of the box. It’s simple enough to understand in a weekend and has been quietly maintained for many years. The only downside is it’s meant mostly for single server deployments, but I’ve never needed another server so far.

https://dokku.com/

Yeah there are a bunch of selfhostable things:

Caprover (https://caprover.com/)

Dokku (https://github.com/dokku/dokku)

But people still choose Netlify and Vercel for ease of use I think.

Maybe we need something that's just Netlify. The closest I've seen to the "right" UX is Ness:

https://ness.sh

The modern iteration of these tools has taken the developer experience learnings from the Platform as a Service (PaaS) category, and will bring them to your own VM, giving you your own personal PaaS. Example of this include Dokku, Coolify, Caprover, Cloud66 and many more!

Based on the fact that your ideal is to have a similar experience to heroku than managing your own server setting up reverse proxies take a look at these options:

1) https://dokku.com - lets you turn your light sail instance basically into heroku

2) https://render.com

3) https://fly.io

4) If you have aws credits this is their heroku equivalent: https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk

above is not what I do but would be the options I would pursue if I understand your preference and requirement correctly.

All in all, I really recommend trying out Dokku if you are a developer interested in hosting your own projects. It makes it super easy to get everything you need to get up and running without having to worry about the specifics. And the price is impossible to beat!

The installation instructions are on the frontpage of our site. Thats basically all you need to do to install Dokku. As far as using it, we have a simplified tutorial here.