Hacker News Reader

Comment by vmg12 | Hacker News Reader

Let's say I'm building a small app that I'm hosting on some shared vps, if I think about the effort involved in setting up sqlite with litestream and just getting a $5 (or free) postgres provider I don't think sqlite makes my life easier.

Now if I'm building a local app then absolutely sqlite makes the most sense but I don't see it otherwise.

View on HN

Litestream is dead simple to setup. You make an S3 bucket (or any compatible storage bucket), paste the access keys and the path to your db file in /etc/litestream, and then run

  dpkg -i litestream.deb
  systemctl enable litestream
  systemctl start litestream

The fact it's so simple is my favourite thing about it.

Are there any use cases/documentation about how litestream can be used within a docker based deployment? (Eg where systemctl wouldn't be used)

You'd probably want to put the sqlite db in a volume & run litestream in a separate container that restarts automatically on failure.

Systemctl's only in there to restart it if it crashes; litestream itself is (iirc) a single cli binary.

This is documented on the Litestream website.

Here's their docs on running in a Docker container: https://litestream.io/guides/docker/

Effort of setting up litestream and sqlite is less time than you spend signing up for supabase. And you can have 100 apps with their own databases for almost free (just a few cents of storage) vs 5*100 for postgres.

I love postgres but in no way is it as simple to run as sqlite (pretty sure even postgres core team would agree that postgres is more complex than sqlite).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com