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Comment by 6ak74rfy | Hacker News Reader

What's the recommend full-stack setup, if not NextJS?

My background: I have ~15 years of software development experience, but practically all of it in backend stuff. (Well, I did some AngularJS a decade ago but that's it.) So, when I recently wanted to build a fullstack app for the first time for a side project, I looked around and learnt NextJS was the way to go. (Gemini said that, then Cline's official documentation said the same.) I am early in the process, so happy to learn of solid alternatives.

I am planning to host everything on some VPSes through Docker, because that's what I am comfortable with. So, no Vercel or Netlify.

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If you don't need server rendering, I'd just recommend React without framework, and Vite [1] to run the app in dev and build the app in prod, then host the build (basically a HTML page with a JS file) on AWS S3 or similar static hosting platforms. That's the solution I've been using for 10+ years without any problem.

For the backend you can use whatever you are comfortable with. I mostly use PostgREST [2] nowadays. I recommend to use react-query [3] to call your APIs on the client side.

[1] https://vite.dev

[2] https://docs.postgrest.org

[3] https://tanstack.com/query/latest/docs/framework/react/overv...

This is the way to go for 99.9% of React apps, I've been using a similar setup for almost 7 years now.

Plain React, Vite, React-Router, & SWR. Is simple & works great for almost every use case.

What are you building? I am working on a classic SaaS webapp, and I have found that using React/Refine.dev/Vite has been great. Refine.dev let me focus on my features, and not basic CRUD page stuff.

I am building an AI application (of course). It'll have an agentic workflow in the backend and exposes a chat style interface to its users. So, not a lot of CRUD stuff.

I would recommend still looking at it for 15 mins. You will still need basic stuff like login pages, a profile page, a responsive nav system, etc., right?

Ack, will do.

If you end up going with something else along these lines, please let me know. I would love to learn more in this space.

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