Hi HN,
We’re building Mist, a lightweight, self-hosted PaaS for running and managing applications on your own servers.
We started Mist because we wanted a middle ground between raw VPS management and heavy, all-in-one platforms. Existing PaaS solutions often felt too complex or resource-intensive for small servers, homelabs, and side projects. We wanted something that keeps the PaaS experience but stays simple and predictable.
Our goals with Mist are:
- A simple PaaS to deploy and manage apps on your own infrastructure
- HTTPS, routing, and app access handled automatically
- Low resource usage so it runs well on small VPSes
- Self-hosted and transparent, with minimal magic
Mist focuses on being an opinionated but lightweight layer on top of your server. It doesn’t try to hide everything behind abstractions, but it does aim to remove the repetitive operational work that comes with managing apps by hand.
Mist is still early, and this is where we really need help. We’re actively looking for:
- Users who want a simple self-hosted PaaS and can share real-world feedback
- Contributors who want to help shape the core features, architecture, and UX
Website: https://trymist.cloud
Repo: https://github.com/corecollectives/mist
Why are binaries checked into the bin/ directory in the repo?
Compared to Dokku, I like how your LE support is builtin instead of a plugin. Is your main www ingress server an nginx that gets externally configured (like Dokku) or are you using net/http or libcaddy directly?
Dokku has a history of trying to compete with Heroku buildpacks - as a non Heroku/non Ruby developer this never resonated with me and there are a lot of vestigal parts (e.g. .web.1) that i would just put in my own Dockerfile directly. So focusing solely on Dockerfiles i personally feel is a good move.
One issue i faced with Dokku is eventually the build process for my Dockerized app was too memory-intensive to run on the VPS. I switched to running docker build locally, sending the container via `docker export | ssh | docker import`, and having a single `FROM myapp` dockerfile in Dokku. This was not particularly ergonomic to set up. Is it possible you can improve the UX of client-side built containers, or will you focus solely on the GitOps deploy?
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