stackFAST

Your (almost) independent tech stack to host on a VPC.

Features

stackFAST includes everything you need to build your App. Focus yourself on developing your idea, instead of "wasting" time on things like setting up auth and observability. This blueprint tries to include as much as possible, but still keep it simple.

The blueprint contains the following features:

• Authentication: Users can login, logout, register and reset their password. For increased security TOTP is available aswell.
• Observability: The stack contains an Grafana+Prometheus instance for basic monitoring. You are able to add alerts and get notified on your phone. For web analytics umami is included, which is an lighweight self hosted alternative to google analytics.
• Mail: You are able to send mail with SMTP. You still need an external Mail Server, but a guide on how to set that up with a custom domain is included.
• SSL: This is included by using traefik as reverse proxy. It handles SSL certificates automatically. Furthermore all services are accessible through subdomains. Best thing is, you can add your more with 3 lines of code
• Actual Stack: SSG SvelteKit + Tailwindcss + DaisyUI + GO Backend for easy and fast feature development

Architecture Design Decisions

Authentication

Authentication is a broad topic. Many people think you should not consider implementing authentication yourself. On the other hand, experts at OWASP don't recommend this in their cheat sheet on that topic. I'm going to explain my criterions and afterwards take a decision.

There are a few restrictions I would like to contain:

• I want this blueprint do as much as as possible without relying on external services. This way the things needs to be done on other website are very minimal. Furthermore I would like to take back privacy from BigTech.
• I think most cloud services are overpriced. I want to provide an alternative approach with self holsting. But I don't like the idea to spin up 30 services for a small app with 0 users. It should still be possible to run on a small VPC (2vcpu, 2GB).
• It should be as secure as possible

As of 2024 there are 4 options:

• Implement the authentication myself: If I'm holding thight to the cheat sheet, I "should" be able to doge "most" security risks and attacks according to this topic. Unfortanatly I'm not an expert in this field and will do some errors. If people will buy this blueprint, I probably can't sleep well. Especially if real users start using it. At least this has the advantage of not adding adittional services or configuration to the project.
• Using OAuth2 with Google and Apple: Using OAuth2 is the standard for secure applications. Google and Apple has their experts. They deal with attacks every hour of the day. This has the advantage, that users don't have to create new credentials. The only disatvantage is my personal hate on big tech.
• Using OAuth2 with Keycloak: Same as above, just that the OAuth2 endpoint is another self hosted service. The only advantage is, it's not proprietary and self hosted. But users are not used to get redirected to a key cloak on sign up. They are used to sign in with Google though. Furthermore Google et. al are protecting themselves against credential stuffing attacks etc.
• Firebase, Clerk, etc.: Users have to sign up again AND blueprint users have to setup another project.

Even though I would really implement authentication myself, I think OAuth2 with external providers is the best bet. Especially because my reasoning is privacy, which most people just don't care about enough. Using this approach, adding in a keycloak is possible without breaking changes at a later point, as long as I keep the Google Sign In.

Email

For Email verification, etc. a mail server is needed, that can send a whole lot of mails. Aditionally, a mail account is needed for incoming mails. I thought about self hosting, but unfortunatly this is a hastle to maintain. Not only you have to setup a mail server, which is not as easy as it sounds, you also have to "register" your mail server for diffrent providers. Otherwise you are not able to send and receive emails. Thus, the first external service is needed.

In order to not vendor lock in, I decided to use an SMTP relay in favor of a vendor specific API. You are free to choose a transactional mail provider. I chose brevo.com. They have a generous free tier of 300 mails per day. You can either upgrade to a monthly plan 10$ for 20k mails or buy credits for 30$ for 5k mails. Most provider provide 100 mails / day for free.