Hello folks,
Over the last 10 months I have been developing a tool to ease the life of other developers. I've realised the need for such a tool when I was adding server side functionality to the e-commerce we develop at work.
The tool is called Stormkit and you can check it out from here: https://stormkit.io
In a few words, it allows hosting and developing modern web applications, with support for server side functionalities like rendering and logging. In other words, it's like Netlify but with focus on the server side support which makes hosting dynamic web applications possible.
Right now it's in an alpha stage and I am looking for people interested using the tool to test it out.
This is where the #help is needed. I don't really know how to proceed to find users who'd like to test this out and give feedback so I could continue to iterate over the software. I am sure there are many entrepreneurs in the community who passed from this stage several times in their lives, and I would be super happy if you can share your experience and guide me.
I would also appreciate honest feedback on the tool. For instance, would you use such a tool? If not perhaps would be very helpful to specify why so I could work on that point.
I appreciate your help, and looking forward for comments!
Top comments (13)
Good job, I noticed that if I click on deploy now from the view Edit Production settings, A deploy task is launched but I am in the same view so I ended up launching multiple deploy tasks without knowing so.
Another remark about "click here to preview" it dosen't make sense that I can preview the app when the deploy already failed.
Finally, a sucessfully deployed react app is not sucessfully deployed, the preview just point to a blank page.
Oh very nice point! I will improve this behaviour.
Regarding the
click here to previewyou're definitely right, will get that fixed.I will check what really happened with the succesfully deployed app.
Your input is very much appreciated, thanks a lot :)
Hello Hamida,
So I have forked your repository to understand what really happened.
From what I can see, you have modified the build settings (which is awesome), and updated the dist folder and also specified an entry file. From the way you have used the app, I got one more feedback :) The entry file is supposed to be the entry file for a server file but I believe it's understood as the entry file for the app. If you specify this, it will enable server side functionality. If you don't enable and leave this empty, it will simply serve the site from the CDN (no server side functionality). But obviously you can't know this because it's written nowhere. Tomorrow I will add some documentation to the config page so that it's more understandable.
The entry file you have specified exports a function, and that function was supposed to be an async function. So I extended the deploy api and now it also handles sync functions.
Here is the a deploy that worked for me: mhuysmeutdyjaara13dlxpmmytkl4kp9-2...
If you re-deploy your site it should just work.
Again, a million thanks for your feedback and trying it out. It helped me a lot.
Glad that I helped
Wow this was harsh :D Thanks a lot for your points.
Regarding the
modern web applicationsI will definitely keep an eye on this as this is the first time that I hear this an issue. I think this is a good article which explains what a modern web application is: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/st...What would you use here as an alternative?
Also, React is only an example, Stormkit is also able to host other frameworks. So far the ones I tested were React and Vue apps.
The boilerplate example is to show how easy it is to add server side functionality to a traditional react-app. I guess this was not clear I will re-check the docs.
In short, If you have a javascript application (like react or vue), and would like to deploy your site and forget about servers and deployments and https configurations, Stormkit is for you.
Is it only capable of hosting Node applications? I'd love to be able to host a Go app I've been working on :)
Otherwise, I took a look around. Looks really good 👍 In a 'Netlify for Node apps' you nailed it.
Hey Meghan, thanks a lot for the lovely feedback :)
So initially Stormkit is targeting indeed static websites and node applications as you pointed out. The reason to target only these is because I'd like to provide additional open-sourced APIs and components (in react and vue for instance) to ease common tasks such as logging, handling auth, forms and managing data.
Technically it's very easy to enable Go apps (or any other app lambda functions support) as well because the infrastructure is very extendible. I'll definitely keep in mind your request :)
Thanks a lot once again!
Easy to build and deploy of static site generator such Hugo, Gatsby, Eleventy, that's the most important part of modern hosting service. So, just add more feature, tutorial, blog post, etc, about how easily to build and deploy them with Stormkit.
what does it better then using Google app engine? how is it different? or did I not understand what it is?
Very good point.
As far as I know, deploying an SPA app with Google App Engine is pretty straightforward. However, some of the things I've noticed:
Finally, GAE is universal. You can host a lot of different applications while here the focus is only web applications. Right now, it's in alpha stage with minimal features. I am trying to gather as much feedback as possible and iterate over the software based on this input.
good points, but also I used it with python & flask for dynamic websites with db access, seemed pretty straightforward to me
I tried to sign up, but the app got stuck here prntscr.com/nq7fvu :/
Hey Tuan Anh, sorry that's a UI bug. You should probably click to connect more repositories and select the repositories you'd like to connect :) Thanks for reporting tho, I fixed and deployed the new version. It should display an error message when you have no repositories connected now.