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Updated 3 months ago

Hosting Builder

At a glance

The post is about hosting a builder, and the comments discuss the challenges of self-hosting the builder. Community members mention that self-hosting is possible but not well-documented or easy, and the easiest way currently is to use vercel. However, some community members disagree that vercel is truly self-hosting, as it still involves a third-party vendor. To self-host the builder, community members suggest setting up infrastructure like a database and asset storage, as well as handling publishing and optimization tasks that are currently handled by the platform. Overall, the comments indicate that self-hosting the builder is doable but requires significant work at this stage.

rrgolab
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both but mainly hosting builder
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10 comments
OOleg Isonen
just to answer your question:
  1. its possible
  2. its not documented or super easy right now, a few things need to be simplified
easierst way to selfhost today is using vercel
OOleg Isonen
we haven't had time to expand and make it all easy for docker, in particular because we are not using it ourselves
rrgolab
thx @Oleg Isonen , but vercel doesn't mean selfhosted - still it's vendor lock, what kind of problems have to be solved to close builder in container?
BBogdan
You would have to setup infrastructure stuff like db and assets storage. Publishing UI would not just work and you would have to publish using only cli instead.
BBogdan
Doable but a lot of work at this stage.
OOleg Isonen
I disagree, its self-hosted in the sense we, webstudio are not hosting it for you, it just doesn't mean docker specifically is supported, this is just one option too
OOleg Isonen
also netlify is supported and tested for publishing sites with netlify
OOleg Isonen
So things that are missing out of top of my head:
For publishing from your own builder instance:

  1. setup the publisher endpoint - service that will be called from builder when hitting publish
  2. bundle the app in the publisher
  3. start the server, watch for changes, ensure its always running
To run your own builder:

  1. setup postgres
  2. start server for the builder, also watch changes, ensure its always running
Published app optimizations:

  1. For automatic image resizing and webp conversion we are using cloudflare's image resizer, so with docker you would need an additional service that does the same thing. Client just tries to load an image from the url you define, service has to deliver and cache resized images
Optionally you could preoptimize manually and just serve whatever you got, but different image sizes need to be served to different screen sizes and layouts.

  1. CDN for static ressources (optional ofc)
I am not sure if I forgot something
OOleg Isonen
Also you would need to connect the project with your dns provider, this is completely outside of webstudio, this is something cloudflare does for us.

Btw. both for builder and for the published site, since these are not the same thing.
rrgolab
thx @Oleg Isonen and @TrySound it helps
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