mkfs VS piku

What a coincidence! I've just been playing with Gokrazy a couple weeks ago, and just kept thinking "this is so cool". If you're building some sort of an appliance, and want the least amount of reliance on / hassle maintaining the base OS, it definitely is a viable choice.

It can also run programs that are not written in go, by using a little neat hack to build/embed a binary inside a Go package; this is e.g. how Gokrazy sets up persistent storage: https://github.com/gokrazy/mkfs

I don't think it's for everyone; if you're relying on your base OS / package manager for a lot of stuff, or just want to run Docker containers, I think there are simpler/better ways to set things up. But it's absolutely great at what it's made for; doubly so with the Raspberry Pi's finally being back in stock.

I should add one to https://piku.github.io (spoiler - this doesn't use Docker at all)

I like it. I wrote Piku (https://github.com/piku/piku) with much the same interest in fixing some of my pains, so I get where you're coming from with this. Will drop it into one of my current projects to build ESP32 binaries :)

I never had any serious issue with SD cards since the Pi 2B (and I've kept Pis running for years).

Anyway, for those wanting to deploy more generic apps, that is why I initially wrote https://github.com/piku/piku - you still have to flash the OS (and rpi-imager does that with sane defaults these days), but once you're done you have Heroku-like deployments for any language runtime you install on the Pi.

I also have https://github.com/rcarmo/ground-init, a cloud-init like shim that simplifies setting up machines (I'm a big fan of cloud-init, but since Raspbian doesn't support it and Ubuntu on ARM requires some fiddling to make it work I decided it wasn't too hard to roll my own).

(I probably should look into glueing that into rpi-imager, but there is are only so many hours in the day...)

I automated that away a long time ago: https://github.com/piku/piku/blob/master/piku.py#L814

Piku https://github.com/piku/piku

So, stupid question: why couldn't I just use the 'baremetal' OS provided by Hetzner, install Postgres, Redis & node, create a separate db for each app, and run each app with https://github.com/piku/piku on a different port? For backups, I'll setup crontab to dump dbs locally and to S3.

piku?