Ask HN: What is your favourite stack for small personal projects?

Laravel + AngularJS + Heroku

Ruby or Ruby on Rails, because they're the ones I'm more proficient in. I did very small projects in Node and Elixir and I would like to become better at Elixir. But the time for personal projects is small so productivity is super important.

In general pick the tools you're better at.

asp.net mvc + EF + AngularJS + TypeScript + Bootstrap, I'm a .Net Developer.

Coffeescript, Flask or Bottle, Heroku. Maybe Firebase if I need a database.

Or if I don't need anything dynamic, Hakyll (Pandoc integrated!), and GitLab Pages (automatic CI deploy via any docker instance from git push).

Java or Python (or occasionally C#).

Why do I need a 'stack' for a personal project ? Also, a weekend-or-two to set-up ?!? If it takes longer than 30 minutes to get going, it's not going to happen.

LAMP + Skelton boilerplate

Ruby on Rails + PostgreSQL hosted on digitalocean. I have written a chef cookbook that helps me configure basic server security and install Rails/Nginx/PostgreSQL with just one command. The automated server setup took around 15 minutes then I can deploy my app to it.

I tend to use Perl (generally via CGI::Application, but more recently with Dancer / Mojolicious). For databases I use MySQL and Redis for caching.

Linode & Docker & bash & (Go v R v Python) & SQLite

If you don't need a database or a dynamic interface, I have a personal site running with Jekyll. It's static and cost a few cents a month to run on Amazon S3 (until I actually get some traffic). Github Pages is also an option if you are going this route.

How many people work on projects expecting them to only be small personal projects vs the start of the next big thing?

As someone who is deep into fancy Javascript stuff (React/Redux/Webpack you name it) at this point I would say PHP7!!

There is something special about being able to create a helloworld.php and have it sit there up and running with reasonable performance without issues so you can forget about it.

Wait until you outgrow it and then consider something else.

I regret wasting so much time (and trust me I'm no noob in this) setting up boilerplate dev environments file watchers transpilers hot module reload nginx reverse proxy server-side rendering server REST API layer client side routing graceful reloading blah blah blah.

Drop a few php files under Apache and keep marching forward.

Java (+ GWT for the web)

I recently found out about http://www.ninjaframework.org/ which makes the process even faster.

Python + django + postgresql

C#, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, Typescript.

C#, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, Typescript.

I'm a dinosaur - I'm still partial to the venerable PHP, SQL, and Regular Old Javascript.

Although I did teach myself how to develop in Hack through Vagrant on Windows, and I kind of prefer Hack to PHP for the XHP extension alone.

Node.js

Usually React, using this boilerplate: https://github.com/davezuko/react-redux-starter-kit which has Webpack and testing already set up.

For APIs I either use Express if it's really small, or Django/Django Rest Framework/Postgres if I want something with admin pages.

Django, HTML/SCSS/jQuery, Zurb Foundation,

Digital Ocean, PostgreSQL, nginx.

Pelican for static websites.

I'm really happy with this choice of tools.

Simple, powerful, elegant, extremely fast and productive, and is pure joy to develop!