shoe-string-server VS harbormaster

I have a very similar system[1] for my personal projects, only I use GitHub actions to push a docker image to ECR and a commit to a config repo bumping the tag. I then have a cronjob to pull the config repo and reconcile using docker compose.

I wouldn't use it for serious stuff, but it's been working great for my random personal projects (biggest gap is if something crashes it'll stay crashed until manual intervention currently)

- [1] https://github.com/mnahkies/shoe-string-server/pull/2

For my personal stuff that doesn't get any traffic I cobbled together some scripts to manage containers / SSL here https://github.com/mnahkies/shoe-string-server

I don't think I ever got around to making it self healing if a container dies, but it does support gitops style deployments through a cronjob / conf repo similar to argocd

It's been running happily on a <$10 / month aws lightsail instance for a few years now, though tbh I'd still reach for k8s for anything serious

Interestingly this seems like a pretty popular problem to solve.

I made a similar thing recently as well, although with the goal to handle ingress and monitoring out the box as well, whilst still able to run comfortably on a small box.

I took a fairly similar approach, leveraging docker-compose files, and using a single data directory for ease of backup (although it's on my to-do list to split out conf/data).

If there was a way to get a truly slim and easy to setup k8s compatible environment I'd probably prefer that, but I couldn't find anything that wouldn't eat most of my small servers ram

https://github.com/mnahkies/shoe-string-server if you're interested

I use an HP ProLiant Microserver with four drives in a ZFS RAIDZ array and an SSD for the OS. For software, I mostly run it in Docker using a very small container orchestration program I wrote:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

I needed something that would restart containers automatically when I pushed to a branch, so I wrote a few lines of code to do it:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

As far as PaaSes go, it's probably the simplest, and works really well.

I was in the same boat as you and built something simple that I really like:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

It'll just pull some repos, make sure the containers are up, and make your configuration simple and discoverable. It really works great at that.

I do this for our services, it works great and we can easily put SSO in front of them with CF Access. I publish a Docker container that you can use as a sidecar for your Compose deployments:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/docker-cloudflared

I use this with Harbormaster (https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster) so I can expose containerized stuff without ever forwarding any ports outside of Docker.

I use Dokku for that (I can share my Bitwarden repo if you want, the entire thing is four lines or something). I also made https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster for things that weren't so "web server -> app -> database" and love it.

I had the same problem and didn't want to manage things by hand, so I wrote Harbormaster:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

It basically pulls Compose apps from the git repositories you specify, builds the containers and makes sure they're running. Pretty simple and works really well for me.

(This post should read "Argo tunnel" instead of just "Argo")

I did the same to enable secure access to services via SSO at work. I used Harbormaster[1] to deploy Compose files, but it's otherwise the same setup.

One of the big advantages this has is that the services can't be accessed any other way (not even from the same host, as they only listen inside the Docker network). That makes it hard to forget some port exposed because you listened to 0.0.0.0 instead of localhost.

Cloudflare access is very easy to set up SSO with, as well. I'd recommend this setup if you need it, though for home usage I usually just set up Caddy as a reverse proxy with basic auth, as I'll be the only person using this and I don't want Cloudflare MITMing my personal stuff.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

Something like harbormaster? https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster