Some thoughts from my attempt to use this

[smolyn]

Cory may have already shared some of these but ...

1. My bad, but attempted to use this on a 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM digital ocean droplet. It immediately melted the droplet. Ran a lot of services, a lot of docker containers. Interestingly there seems to be some sort of deferred container building or something going on? normally when i use docker compose, it downloads and preps all the images. This seems to have done some of that, but then a TON of more downloads + building occured after the initial start up. This was a major contributor to the complete lockup of that droplet. This stuff really should be done up front please.

1a. A more staged startup would be useful, a big bang launch everything + build at once is effectively a DOS on your server. Honestly there should be NO building on a server -- this could be a production instance running other things as well.

2. The instructions are useful for how to run the commands and syntax, but absolutely useless at telling you how to set things up. How do I add a user, for example -- am I just supposed to know all the various ways "authentik" has been set up? Information on how these things work and work together would be useful.

3. I am not a docker compose expert (mostly an intermediate user), but it seems to me like there are a LOT of duplicate services being run here. Why are there unique redis, postgres, etc, databases being started? The whole point of those services are that they can be shared between other services!! This contributes to a TON of extra load and memory requirements, I would consider figuring out how to normalize the docker compose files and share those services across the other apps.

4. Create a .env file or something, where I can put the hard coded passwords that are needed (ie. postgres root, etc) and perhaps some other variables that can be a simplified starting point for configuring other tools. There are SO MANY tools here, and definitely need some simpler way to configure.

My experience:
Basically, I downloaded this and tried it, it melted my server and was doing too much. Honestly I don't know all the various apps and utilities and was mostly just looking for gitea and a kanban board, ideally with some SSO, and the ability to expand this out later.
Trying to understand how to do this with the supplied documentation was too hard though, and I basically just ended up going to the various tools themselves and figuring it out myself.
At this point, it was easier to just create my own single docker-compose.yml, and connect everything that way.
Basically because I had to go through this exercise, it's fairly easy to maintain my own file and have it configured and normalized.

Your project was great for inspiration, but because I had to become such an expert to understand what the heck it was doing, how it was doing it, why it was doing it, and how to configure and debug the individual components, it actually ended up teaching me enough to be good at docker-compose, and then to just go off and maintain my own since they really aren't that complex. In some ways, it seems like you've overcomplicated a simple system, and not actually made it simpler.
I think the trick here would be to ensure this system is actually indeed simpler -- interactive config, clear documentation on how to configure, a real quickstart where it tells you "here is how you select the actual required things - traefik, authentik... here are the other tools you can optionally enable - gitea, crm, etc" and then instructions on how to set up a new user, how to ensure that its working across otehr tools, how to set up SQL DB initialization files.
The list of env variables in the current docs are not useful to me --they basically require me to know what those are... which means i need to go to that project and figure it out myself -- this is not easier ,this is harder! Now I have both your shtool/manager to know AND these other tools.

Anyways, thanks for the inspiration at the very least, I hope you guys can get to something more automatic/dummyproof!

[smolyn]

Also it would be useful if you put a description about the general architecture/design/strategy of the shtool+manager. Why is it special, what is it doing, how is it "managing" and how is that better than just running docker compose up -d

Without that information, shtool is just another black box that i have to figure out (and did have to figure out) how to debug.
I also don't know how it would apply to my specific situation, or how I should be prepared to have it work in my environment.

If I'm diving into code and the various docker-compose.ymls, you've already lost me... and also already trained me to go away and just write the simpler version myself. As docker-compose is relatively straightforward, especially with help from claude.

[afreydev]

@smolyn , thank you so much for taking the time to share all this feedback! 🙌
It’s truly a great input for helping us move the project forward. We’re actually in the process of updating the roadmap, since the project is at a young stage, but with quite an ambitious scope for the future.

We’ll definitely be including many of the recommendations you mentioned, along with important improvements in usability and documentation. As you mention at this point, the project doesn’t really stand out as being aimed at new users without much Docker (and Linux) experience. Your experience really helps us prioritize and get better!