Build web apps the boring way.

The movement

Boring Stack is for builders who would rather ship a small, understandable system than rent a distributed platform before the product earns it. The movement is the public practice: publish the defaults, publish the costs, publish the failures, and make the simple path easier to choose next time.

The newsletter keeps those defaults honest by showing how they hold up in real products built by people running the stack.

Join the movement

What this is

1. The CLI. Run boringstack new myapp and get a working, tested Go app with the stack decisions and deploy files checked in. Run boringstack dev to see it and boringstack deploy when the VPS is ready.
2. The skill. Ask your coding agent to build a product using Boring Stack. It runs a five-question fit check, starts from the same canonical scaffold, then adds the actual product slice. Pushes back on Postgres, Vercel, ORMs, Docker, and microservices when they don't fit. Always defers to your call.
3. The templates. The exact deploy.sh, Caddyfile, app.service, and Litestream config used in real production. Drop them in, replace the hostnames, ship. Zero magic.
4. The manifesto. Seven principles for shipping software that stays out of your way. Quote it, link it, fork it. Read the manifesto.
5. The movement. A weekly newsletter on how to build with Boring Stack: real costs, boring decisions, restore drills, launch notes, template changes, and war stories from people running the stack.

Install

Give your AI coding agent better defaults. One line, works with every major AI coding tool.

$ curl -fsSL https://boringstack.org/install.sh | bash

That clones the repo to ~/.boring-stack, builds the CLI into ~/.local/bin when Go 1.22+ is available, and wires the skill into tools that have a user-level config. Then make the idea concrete:

$ boringstack new expense-tracker
Created expense-tracker (19 files).
→ go test ./...       ok
→ go build .          ok

$ cd expense-tracker && boringstack dev
→ running http://localhost:8080

Or tell your coding agent: Build me an expense-tracking SaaS using Boring Stack. The agent starts from the same scaffold and adds a complete feature slice instead of another abstract stack recommendation.

For tools that only support per-project rules, run this from inside any project where you want the boring stack defaults:

$ curl -fsSL https://boringstack.org/add.sh | bash

Auto-detects your project's existing AI tool configs and drops the right file in each. Falls back to AGENTS.md (the portable convention) if nothing's set up yet.

tip: the skill is MIT and stays MIT. Use it, fork it, ignore it, write a better one.

Give your AI coding agent better defaults

• Postgres SQLite + WAL + Litestream10k+ writes/sec on a $5 VPS. Continuous backup to R2 for $0.50/mo. Migration to Postgres later is pgloader + a connection string.
• Vercel Hetzner + Caddy$5/mo at every scale. Caddy auto-handles HTTPS via Let's Encrypt. No certbot, no cron, no nginx.
• Prisma / GORM stdlib + sqlcType-safe Go generated from .sql files. No runtime layer. Read your own queries.
• Docker / K8s systemd + one binaryAlready on every Linux box. Restart=on-failure is one line. journalctl is your log aggregator.
• Microservices Go monolith with internal packagesCompiler-enforced module boundaries. Extract behind HTTP later when team and traffic actually demand it.
• React + Vite + Tailwind html/template + htmx + a single CSS fileHTML over the wire — the Rails 7 / Hotwire bet, in Go form. One <script> tag (htmx from a pinned CDN, swap to self-hosted any time), no build step, no node_modules. Companion JS (Alpine, Stimulus, vanilla) picked by interactivity need. Full SPA toolchain stays in scope when the product genuinely needs one (Figma/Linear class); backend stays boring.

Templates

The configs the skill ships with. Each one is derived from real production use, lightly edited to use placeholder hostnames.

• deploy.sh10 lines. build, scp, restart, healthz.
• Caddyfile8 lines. Auto-HTTPS reverse proxy.
• app.service22 lines. Hardened systemd unit with NoNewPrivileges, ProtectSystem=strict, ReadWritePaths scoped.
• litestream.service15 lines. Continuous SQLite replication to R2.
• litestream.yml10 lines. R2 destination, env-var secrets.