Enable GitHub Discussions

[jgarte]

Hi,

What do you think of enabling GitHub Discussions for textual-web or should I be using the textual GitHub Discussions tab to discuss textual-web?

Will textual-web be a pay for use service or is this something that users can compile and deploy themselves on their own server?

[willmcgugan]

I think the Textual repo is probably the best place ATM.

Textual-web will be a Software as a Service, with a generous free tier.

[jgarte]

Thanks for the info.

Will some core part of textual-web not be open source?

Will I be able to run the service myself or deploy the textual app on my own server or VPS on Digital Ocean, for example?

[willmcgugan]

textual-web is open source. You can run that on your own server(s) or VM, and serve as many apps as you like.

Textual-web connects to a server that we host, which provides the front-end. That part is proprietary.

[jgarte]

Thanks for the reply and I appreciate that a textual-web app front-end will be able to run on my own self-hosted server or VPS.

How difficult will the process be for an average devops engineer to deploy a textual-web app to their own server without the proprietary backend?

What will that process look like more or less? Would it just be a matter of copying over or installing a self-contained environment for the app and running it via a service manager like systemd, for example (ignoring https and domain setup, etc.)?

[willmcgugan]

I'm afraid that it won't be possible to use textual-web without our service. In the future, we will likely offer an on-prem solution, but not until we have refined the SaaS.

Hypothetically though, it wouldn't be that hard. You would need to create a Postgres DB, configure the server, and run it like any other web app.

Do you have any particular concerns about the SaaS solution that would prevent you from using it?

[VexiaOnline]

I will leave the comment here as it's related to the discussion:

I for one would really enjoy being able to deploy the front-end stuff on my own machine(s). SaaS is fine, and I understand that companies likely would like a return for their invested time and efforts, but a lot of things I want to host are likely tools or IoT things that might not even have internet connectivity to use your hosted option. Being able to tinker or play with things offline, or in a static state where I don't have to worry about relying on outside services is also something that I generally love.

So while I might use textual-web through your SaaS, I would whole-heartedly use it for basically everything if I could self host. I think it would be a much more lightweight, beautiful, and useful way to do things than having to use something like Flask where I would still have to worry about web development stuff which I am not interested in.