Show HN: I got tired of managing dev environments, so I built ServBay

This looks interesting.

One small feedback: It took me a while to figure out what it actually does. The homepage makes it look more like coolify or dokku.

> slow file sync on macOS

So at your core you’re trying to solve an Apple bug?

Looks interesting enough to try out. i was looking if it explicitly supported django but it supports the underlying tech.

If there were a servbay.yaml file that a person could export & commit this would probably go down smoother from some folks.

If you added a feature to push/fetch and sync the local development database from an s3 (or like bucket) it would solve one of the real core problems of new developers getting started.

That nginx proxy probably works 99.999% of the time, but oh boy, is that .001% going to tick someone off. Proxy's always add a small layer of complexity that can fubar things in strange ways, i know from running many of proxies in production just fine until that tiny little app/proxy config change that borks it. I haven't dug in enough yet, but i hope it can be bypassed.

Ambitious project that I think has some legs. A lot of devs dislike docker and many teams struggle to use it well anyway (for instance, a good dev Dockerfile is usually not the same as a good production Dockerfile). You will need to make this more "IAC-like" if you want to beat it though, imho.

Keep going and good luck!

This post reads like you just finished building this (congrats!) and even says:

> The project is still young

But the website is stuffed with AI and yet "Trusted by over 100,000 developers worldwide"?

Doesn't pass the smell test for me.

Congrats on building this. But, please do not auto translate your website content, English is fine. For my language the part about trust is really cringe, which is not really building trust, you know.

I feel like SSL certificates for local environments is a red herring. For 95% of the developers, I would imagine, absolutely do not need it and 4% that say they do are using http://127.0.0.1 instead of http://localhost and wondering why they're getting errors that the site isn't secure?

These are my concerns watching this video:

1. In a team environment, this seems like it would cement bad long-term practices into your workflow. So much is happening outside of source control. I see there's a unified configuration feature but it seems like a GUI of various ways to make a big mess that your future DevOps team is going to facepalm about and untangle.

2.

> For years, my local development setup has been a fragile mess of tools that never quite played nicely together. On my mac, it was a constant battle with Homebrew services starting (or not starting) on boot, conflicting PHP and Node versions managed by `asdf` or `nvm`, and a collection of `docker-compose.yml` files that I'd copy-paste and tweak for every single project. The cognitive load was just too high.

This to me reads as "I don't know what I'm doing and I'm having a bad time." Me personally, I'm not copying and pasting docker-compose.yml files around manually, I'm using source control with a development team and using feature branches like a well-adjusted person. I'm not constantly battling with Homebrew, none of my development environments depend on Homebrew as that is not what the tool is for.

3. In the demo video, the use of AI imagery (of a particularly low quality) and the AI narrator seems very lazy and makes me think that I shouldn't use the app because it might be AI slop with lots of bugs and security issues. I'd rather see a demo given by someone who isn't the best speaker than hear a fake AI voice.

4. The "Why not just use Docker?" question has not been sufficiently countered.

Not sure if it suits your goal but I would suggest using mise. https://mise.jdx.dev/

Those of us that use Nix don't have the problems you complain about. Just write (or vibe-code) a flake.nix for each project, and you can have arbitrary versions of whatever language (Node, PHP, whatever), arbitrary environment variables, port setups, and whatever else. Add in Direnv and you don't have to do anything but `cd` into your project directory. Then simply add an extra output to create a Docker image for your project.

The idea of paying double digits annually for a service that's basically a weaker version of Nix, and which lacks Linux support, is absurd.

Not sure if your testimonials are real or not. The few I looked at didn't appear in any google results and many have AI looking avatars one is even named "jaime freelancer"