What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2020?

Question

What services and technologies do you use when you'd like to quickly build a web app which may never be more than a prototype, but may also turn into something real? A big aspect of what I'm wondering is about automatically setting something up for keeping local/production environments in sync, quickly deploying to production, and not having to mess with a bunch of server configuration things, user accounts, security, etc.

ecmascript · Accepted Answer

Laravel, php and https://forge.laravel.com.
You can get basically the same functionality with Docker in other languages as well. But setting up Docker is a bit more complicated as it requires you to configure it properly and doesn't really secure your vps so you still have to have basic linux skills to configure ssh to disallow password logins.
A good thing can also be to setup a firewall or fail2ban if you intend to keep password login available for some reason.
I think you'll never really can avoid setting up stuff, even if you use AWS, Azure or GCP it will still require configuration even if a lot can come out of the box.

karmakaze · Answer

For backend, I have some cheap VMs running in Vultr, DigitalOcean, or AWS for small projects. I have a script that checks for upstream git changes and updates itself from the `prod` branch and restarts (sometimes with a build step, e.g. .jar).
For frontend, I usually deploy with Netlify from a git repo. DNS is handled with CloudFlare and sometimes CDN as well. Namecheap for domains (may be moving my .com/net/org domains to CloudFlare).
Edit: it's very easy to make systemd.unit service config files so I usually also do that too.
For extra IP addresses, you can use IPv6 with your instance and have CloudFlare do the IPv4 -> IPv6 for you.