alt Hacker NewsIn my younger years, classic ASP + SQL was easy, and I had IIS + SQL Server set up on a server at my house. And I could write HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
Deployment was... run update scripts, push ASP files via FTP.
Now I know there are newer ways to do things, and I'd love to set up CI/CD in my personal life, but every time I want to do a "toy project" I get hung up researching and thinking about my own personal software development life cycle.
What you choose for hosting and deployment for your toy projects?
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For most of my toy projects, it's a systemd service file and rsync + restart command for deploys. Might have to SSH in and run an install command occasionally.
You can get a VPS in any cloud provider and treat it as your server, just copy files to it. It depends on the scope of your projects, though, if you need a lot of resources it can get pretty pricey for just toy projects.
I pay $12 for a server on Digital Ocean, and I host multiple servers behind an Nginx. But I am primarily a frontend/Desktop developer, so they are simple.
I've got a VPS and domain I've had for a long time - for most of these, docker compose + the VPS did the job just fine. I was in the same boat - I'd fallen behind on a lot of the ops stack, and project setup wound up being a tar pit for a couple projects before I got frustrated and just said "Fuck it" and did it the dumb way, which wound up being the correct approach.
I found the trick with the personal projects was to pick the thing I was trying to learn with that project and focus on that - if I was trying to learn React, don't also try to learn kubernetes or lambdas or anything else. You really have to be comfortable with your project kind of sucking for all this to work.
So I'd say if you want to learn proper modern deploy + CI/CD + etc, take a project where you already know the rest of the stack (hell, make it Hello World if you have to) and use that. Keep things simple and in scope, get something stupid working, and then iterate to make it better.