Show HN: Clace – Nginx Unit alternative – app server for internal apps

I have been building https://github.com/claceio/clace, an open source project for developing internal web tools.

Nginx Unit supports multiple languages but the user is responsible for managing the language runtime and dependency installation. Clace takes the approach of supporting only one language but makes app installation simpler, with no dependencies to manage. Apps are installed (from GitHub or local source) to a particular domain:path. All sub paths within that top level path are available for use within that app. This means that you can manage multiple apps on a single Clace server, without having to worry about a change in one app breaking other apps.

Clace apps are written in Starlark, which provides a simple python-like glue language to work with external APIs which are exposed through plugins. Clace and its plugins are implemented in go, the app code to plugin boundary is used to implement a security sandbox.

Apps use a no-build step approach, using Starlark and go HTML templates for hypermedia driven web apps with HTMX and Tailwind support. A gitops type deployment model is used for app updates, with staged deployment and preview environments. For example, an app at example.com:/myapp will have a staging app at example.com:/myapp_cl_stage. This allows any changes to be verified in staging before being made live.

To install and try it out, run

  curl -L https://clace.io/install.sh | sh
  source $HOME/clhome/bin/clace.env
  clace server start & 
    
  clace app create --auth-type=none --approve /disk_usage github.com/claceio/clace/examples/disk_usage # This installs a du like webapp
  clace app create --auth-type=none --approve /book github.com/claceio/apps/utils/bookmarks  # This installs a bookmark manager which uses sqlite for persistence

The installed apps are available at https://localhost:25223/disk_usage and https://localhost:25223/book. Try it out, would appreciate any feedback.