3 posts tagged with "indie-dev"

Every indie developer has been there: you've got a docker-compose.yml that works perfectly on your laptop. Redis, Postgres, your app — all wired up, healthy, humming.

Then you try to deploy it.

You either wrangle with a VPS, a Dockerfile, a reverse proxy, SSL certificates, and systemd units — or you pay a managed platform that doesn't understand docker-compose.yml natively and forces you to rewrite everything in their DSL.

Filess Hosting takes your docker-compose.yml and runs it on Kubernetes, with zero Kubernetes knowledge required. Here's the full technical picture of what happens when you push a commit.

You've built a feature. It works on your machine. You open a PR.

Your CI pipeline runs unit tests. They pass. Your reviewer approves the PR.

You merge. You deploy. Production breaks.

The bug was a subtle interaction between your code and the database schema — something unit tests couldn't catch because they mock the database. Integration tests could have caught it, but your integration test suite either doesn't exist or runs against a shared staging database that's full of dirty state from the last developer who also tested there.

The real fix is an ephemeral database per PR: a fresh database, identical to production schema, provisioned when the PR opens and destroyed when it merges. Your integration tests run against it. Nothing shares state between PRs.

Filess has two APIs. Knowing which one to use matters.

You're building a Stripe webhook handler. Your local dev server is running on port 3000. Stripe needs a public URL to send events to. You do what every developer has done before: open a terminal and type ngrok http 3000.

It works. For a while.

Then you hit the rate limit. Or the random subdomain changes every restart. Or you need to whitelist a specific IP and ngrok's plan doesn't cover it. Or your company's security policy blocks third-party tunneling software.

At Filess, we built our own managed tunnel infrastructure, and we're making it available as part of the platform. Here's the full technical breakdown of how it works.