Self-hosted Anvil runtime limitations

Anvil Q&A
1

I have a simple question; if I choose to host my own Anvil server / runtime, will I face any limitation(s) comparing the cloud version?
I’m planning to develop & test applications on Anvil platform (most probably Individual Plan) then deploy them on my local server.

2

Welcome to the Anvil Community Forum!

This section of the on-line help might be a good starting point: Deploy on your own hardware

From the README.md:

This repository contains a standalone web server that serves a single Anvil app.

(Italics mine.)

3

Thank you very much for your help.
I just wanted to know, in advance, if there will be any limitations, before going deeper.
Looks like Anvil is very transparent & generous on sharing their infrastructure :slight_smile:

4

This topic has come up from time to time, in the Forum. That makes Forum Search quite helpful.

5

Right, there has been a lot of discussion of this lately, such as this one and others by @Tony.Nguyen: Limitations of open source server

6

In my view, you shouldn’t use it in production for mission critical apps , it is extremely hard to scale more than one server, and have bugs: Issues · anvil-works/anvil-runtime · GitHub

The Anvil team monitor this forum and often fix the cloud version’s critical bug within 24 hours, but take days or weeks for the self-hosted Anvil.

My dream is to deploy anvil on Heroku or Google App Engine.

7

Thank you very much for all inputs and reminders. It is very nice & encouraging to see helpful people around, during warming up with the system :slight_smile:

@Tony.Nguyen, I didn’t think about bug fixes tbh, thanks for pointing out. My plans are mostly for small business clients who doesn’t want to keep data outside and not willing to pay for subscription. One time fee + support only.

8

My clients ask the same, and some even refused to use Anvil because of the current open source issues.

At the moment, it is not possible to use custom authentication with Anvil App Server v1.6.5

The default authentication / User Services needs SMTP, which is quite tricky to set up. Also it is impossible to change messages to local language and modify code to meet clients’ requirements.