piku VS CapRover

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?

Finally, I kinda wonder if CapRover is still alive. As I write this it has been over 60 days since there has been any activity on their GitHub.

https://github.com/caprover/caprover https://github.com/caprover/one-click-apps

Looks like Caprover https://github.com/caprover/caprover which has been around for a bit, have used in past. Any notable benefits over it?

CapRover's NGINX doesn't support sticky sessions (see this issue).

All the ways I've found imply dokku or caprover, to run docker for each separate app, Postgres, Redis. It's also so hard to even setup db backups (https://github.com/caprover/caprover/issues/158 https://github.com/caprover/caprover/issues/410).

You should definitely looking for Caprover. It has a really really big App Library. A demo is also available online.

Another possibility would be to use selfhosted caprover (https://github.com/caprover/caprover) for the Website Hosting. Leaves you still with the e-mail problem.