sequencer VS piku

I really love this idea in theory, and I believe that for some system, specially mature ones, it may work well. I see good documentation as a super power; it empowers readers and motivate people to understand more about the system without being caught in the weeds of reading the source.

The source has baggages, and the intent of every single function calls is not always evident. Writing documentation up-front can help direct the source, but this is a tug-of-war environment. Each affect the other in its own ways.

And for that reason, documentation driven development can be a real drag. You start writing documentation with the best intentions, everything works great for this first release. But 2 months down the road you need to modify something and it has a ripple effect on many of the things you documented. It's a non-negligible cost.

I've been working on this open-source tool(https://github.com/pier-oliviert/sequencer) and I've spent a lot of time on the documentation. And what I described above happened. I wanted to make a not-too-big change, and it required me to rewrite 30% of the documentation. I still love the documentation aspect of it, but it definitively has a cost.

First time I read about piku. I have no idea why, but the feeling of `git push` to initiate a deployment like piku does always felt magical to me. There's nothing simpler than that.

This is timely for me as well as I just open sourced (yesterday!) a project that is in the same space, but for Kubernetes (https://github.com/pier-oliviert/sequencer).

All of this to say, congrats! It looks great.

It's actually worth taking your joke seriously to compare and contrast:

- piku deploys via git rather than scp/sftp, but authenticates via ssh like those tools

- piku supports a number of runtimes, including Python, Ruby, Node, Go, Clojure. The runtimes are implemented rather simply, you can add your own rather easily, see examples here in the code: https://github.com/piku/piku/blob/8777cc093a062c67d3bead9a5d...

- For each runtime, a mechanism is utilized to install and isolate package dependencies (requirements.txt in Python, Gemfile in Ruby, packages.json in Node, etc.)

- a Procfile and ENV file are used to declare your application entrypoints, akin to Heroku / 12 Factor App ideas

- a CLI is provided for checking status and logs from the client

- since all applications are managed via uwsgi, there is also some support for cronjob-style tasks

- HTTPS via Let's Encrypt (acme.sh) is handled automagically for web apps

I describe more about how piku works in this tutorial:

https://github.com/piku/webapp-tutorial?tab=readme-ov-file#b...

You're right that PHP apps have a simple deployment story, and in a way piku brings something akin to this level of simplicity to other web programming runtimes.

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?