Project migration discussion

Glitch Help
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Hi folks, as mentioned in today’s blog post, we’ve been preparing a list of suggested platforms that we’ve tested migrating Glitch projects to. It’s almost ready, but in the meantime, we wanted to provide a focused space for the community to share things they’re thinking about doing and (once the guide is available) give feedback on anything that might need improvements.

I’ve been taking a look at a few myself for my own projects and now have some stuff on GitHub and DigitalOcean but I haven’t kept up with all the cool new options. Does anyone want to start things off with a platform they can recommend?

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so i’ve been using digital ocean’s app platform to deploy my 4 main static sites (personal, store, blog, make8bitart) because it comes with custom domain management that’s been extremely stable. it’s free for the first 3 static sites and then $3/month for every static site after that. i have the sites deploy when i merge changes into their respective github repos - but if anyone can recommend version control that’s not trying to force feed me AI, pls let me know.

i now have the daunting feat of speedrunning through several hundred apps made over the last 9 years because the fastly council of elders couldn’t even give us a week for each year the platform’s been running :tomato: :tomato: :tomato: BUT i will go through each one! because i am not warren buffett and/or jd rockefeller in this economy, i will not be deploying every single site - instead i’m trying out a /glitch subdirectory on my personal site to move the apps i want live there; for example, i’ve already moved ~candlemakinginventory. i’ll miss the ability to edit in a portable live environment on glitch, but i’ve been enjoying using nova locally.

if i hit any node apps i absolutely need alive, i’ll probably just deploy a droplet running node and do a similar multi-app setup there - but i don’t think i’m going to need an active node container up in that way. if anyone has a recommendation for a way to run, for example, a bluesky bot for free, i’d love to know!

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We’re really close to publishing some guides but I want to quickly mention here that for static sites, Netlify is literally a breeze. I could not believe how easy it was to download a project from Glitch and drag it into their UI. And since those are the only types of apps I create :nerd_face: that’s most likely what I’ll be doing with my Glitch side projects. :smiling_face_with_tear:

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Discussion thread: Project Hosting Ending July 8

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Waiting eagerly to see what people are doing about their Node hosting. I can easily move static sites over as subsites of my Netlify. For active Node hosting, I am a bit container skeptic, so not too sure about Fly.io and its ilk. I’m interested in whether DO is a good fit, but I may just get better value for money on some solid shared hosting that supports Node, right?

I’m a cheapskate so I’d hope to transfer my 10 or so most valuable Glitch Node sites over to something costing me less than £5/mo total :smiley:

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What about Vercel?

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yeah I’ve not found any good options for node apps that also have persistent storage. a VPS has good pricing but then I have to learn to manage a server which I have worked hard to avoid.

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i personally use Render.com for all of my projects. you can have 1 node app online 24/7 through one account (if you ping it). it’s also pretty similar to glitch in it’s static sites and can deploy from github.

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I used to use digital ocean for some small work projects and I hated how bulky and involved the site was. hosting node apps on glitch was as easy as doing it from my computer and they just worked. I haven’t had to set up or deploy a project in years and frankly I’m not sure I remember how. really really hoping someone comes up with a replacement that lets me rehost without going back to school to remember how

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Unfortunately, not much is free anymore… I’m switching over to VPSs.
For hosting Ill be using: https://www.ionos.com/ Super cheap, unmetered bandwidth, a lot of storage. Probably the closest thing you’ll find to glitch. Will take a bit of know-how if you’ve only ever used glitch before, but youtube tutorials would probably suffice.
For domain/dns management Ill be using cloudflare which does 95% of the work for you.

Theoretically, if you wanted to keep all your projects alive, you could just throw em all on one vps and have it spin up an instance whenever its requested. Kind of like how glitch works now (I feel something premade that does this already should have been provided…)

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yeah I’m not worried about it being free, I just don’t want to have to relearn how to deploy stuff from a cli again or worry about all the nuanced stuff that doesn’t matter for a tiny node app, I just need it to be live all the time

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Hiya, I wish I had easier options to share but well, there’s a reason I’ve used Glitch for education projects all these years (and through several jobs lol). That said, I’ve been exploring other platforms recently and am feeling more optimistic about enabling folk to make the web than I’d have expected right now..! :woozy_face:

On the Fastly front I can share some resources that I hope might be helpful. If you have a static site, like Hello Website, Hello Eleventy, a Glitch in Bio, or even a Hello React remix, you can deploy that entirely to Fastly Compute and serve it to your users from the edge without using a separate hosting service. You just need a free Fastly developer account to grab an API key from.

We know onboarding to Fastly isn’t as easy as other platforms and want to fix that. My coworkers created a Static Publisher tool for deploying sites to Fastly Compute. You can use the tool directly yourself on static Glitch projects you’ve downloaded, but I’ve been working on a migration resource that I hope will make the experience a bit smoother for anyone who would like to try a Fastly deploy…

All of this is part of us figuring out what a great onboarding flow for deploying to Fastly would look like. On that note I’ve also been experimenting with container configs to make a more Glitch-like experience in GitHub Codespaces and have used some of that work for the migration tool.

Here it is after deploying Glitch in Bio:

Glitch in bio in Codespace
Glitch in bio in Codespace1920×1006 146 KB

:construction: It’s extremely WIP and will absolutely break, it’s also a wee bit awkward to use tbqh! I’d love suggestions on making the flow better and supporting more Glitch apps, so please share either here or in the repo. You’re of course welcome to amend it to use other deploy targets (GitHub Pages is fairly straightforward from the Codespace and you can use Actions for other platforms from there too).

:bird: The MIGRATE.md doc has the steps in it – feel free to create or comment on the issues.

:raising_hands: Thank you for all the tips and utilities for project download bcs I don’t even want to think about all the daft personal projects I’ve made on Glitch over the years yet. :sob:

:alarm_clock: I’m unavailable for most of Fri so there might be a delay in me responding to any queries, but I will get back to you when I can.

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I don’t know.

sighhh.

I might just host them on my website. For uptime-python projects, I have always used self-hosting.

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Hello everyone,

Just popping in to share that we have the first set of migration guides available on the Glitch Help Center. So if you were looking for advice on how to migrate your 11ty blog, static-site or full-stack site, please check those out. I’ll share more updates as we add them, thank you!

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I just finished migrating my fastify node app to vercel, so that could be another topic for the glitch help center.

It was pretty easy except for the part where I spent 3 hours debugging and trying to get it to work.

It’s sad to hear that Glitch is shutting down because I just discovered it two weeks ago.

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Following up on my post in main announcement thread: does anyone know of a platform, that will apart from hosting also have online live editor and preferably an easy, browser-based way to upload assets? Those are my main advantages of Glitch and most of the alternatives are suited to far more advanced users than my students. :frowning:

Thanks in advance!

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i havent found a perfect match, but https://vscode.dev/ / https://github.dev/ has been the most promising option i can find (for working with static sites online - but alas, no live preview)

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i’m probably gonna switch to my rpi and cloudflare tunnels for servers, cloudflare pages for static stuff

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The dashboard downloads don’t include the assets, just a file with links to them. How long will the assets be available on cdn.glitch.global ?

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Currently, they will only be available until July 8th as well. If for some reason that were to change, we will absolutely notify the community, but to be on the safe side use that date as your target.

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@jennwrites thanks

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Has anyone considered the free tier of Azure App Service? Can create and deploy to it all from vscode. I use that for all my projects now.

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My main site is hosted on Neocities, so I’ll be moving my Glitch projects there. Static hosting only, but it has an online editor (no live preview) and files can be dragged and dropped into the browser. I led an intro HTML/CSS workshop last summer, and that’s where I had everyone set up their sites. I recommend it, especially to those looking for free beginner-friendly options for students.

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Before I found glitch i enjoyed the fact that in AWS(!!), I could write serverless Node functions (“lambdas”) in the browser and very easily store assets. But everything else was very hard. Very very hard.

(Since then I used Firebase for similar purposes, but I am responding in a separate post about my Firebase experience.)

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Thank you for suggestions. I use it for education for students to create and learn. I am exploring various options.

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At one point I used AWS for commercial work and Glitch for fun and experimentation.
But AWS makes everything [except bucket-based storage] a giant royal pain in the butt, with a million layers of abstraction and documentation that is written for those who already know what it is explaining.

So I found myself publishing some serious stuff on Glitch. It works now, I figured, and I’ll worry later about scaling. [Later is here, brothers and sisters!]

But I have one large-scale project that needed a complete re-architecture. Way too big for Glitch, so I tried moving ii from AWS to Google’s platform (Firebase).

I like. Google Cloud Storage is as easy to use as AWS and features like IAM are a million times simpler, especially if you want to collaborate.

Simple static hosting on Firebase, is super easy and pretty much free. Unlike Glitch, I can stay in VSCode and instantly deploy to Firebase hosting and push to GitHub repo, while managing my assets very directly. Frankly it is so easy that, without thinking about it, I stopped using Glitch for quicky hosting. Firebase is free, easier and more secure (repo-wise) and so much better performance. (Glitch, I still love you.)

Also you get user authentication for free (I use it) and tons of tracking features that I do not use as well as a million infrastructure features I don’t even understand.

It gets hairy when you want to move your Glitch Node apps.

I have ported small Glitch Node Express servers to serverless Cloud Run functions (These run Express under the hood, it turns out) – and this is relatively easy. With enough work. In fact I usually edit these in the cloud, like with Glitch (Cloud Run functions do not play nice with VSCode and Github😒) .

Serverless functions may be impractical if you have a complex server. I’m about to find out.

But the huge problem with Firebase is no SQL support. I ported my big app from SQL to their NoSQL database but it was a huge job with a lot of rethinking. But the result is worthwhile. The new database is better in most ways.

I have an active public app on Glitch now that uses the wonderful SQLLite. It is a complex app with many daily users who submit and discuss some important UGC. Database is the core of the app and I really do not want to rebuild it. I don’t think I can in this six week window.

Any ideas where to go with a system based on SQLLite3??

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Super sad that Glitch is shutting down. I’ve been here since the Hyperdev days. Also, at risk of making @jenn say something out of pocket, Glitch really should charge for hosting! Make it utterly exorbitant – it’s better than having no option at all. You could even make it so expensive that you expect everyone to choose to migrate. At least it would let people pay for more time to migrate.

But if that’s a lost cause…

I see that Replit has an old “import from Glitch” feature from some years ago when they first caught up to Glitch in terms of project hosting:

https://replit.com/glitch

Unfortunately, it’s not working for me. Is it working for others? If not, I wonder if Replit could be persuaded to fix it, since it might net them a lot of us Glitch emigres.

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LOL I just used it two minutes ago, it doesn’t seem like it does anything but when you go to Apps, the imported project does show up, assuming your tier isn’t maxed out.

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If people are looking for a paid alternative, Replit is perfect, but only if you are wanting to pay. You can only have 3 free “repls” on a free account.

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i haven’t started migrating my stuff yet, but https://napkin.io might be a good fit for node-based projects. It’s got the nice feature of being able to have projects with their source code public, as on glitch, so if I want things to be public but not deployed through some silly github actions workflow, I can just chuck them on there. Definitely better for smaller things though - it’s serverless functions rather than a server.

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val.town too, but i would recommend cloudflare workers+pages

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Have we learned nothing from Glitch’s demise? So much better to be a paying customer!

Here’s my brainstorming list of options to check out:

  1. Replit
  2. GitHub Codespaces + Live Share + Pages
  3. CodeSandBox
  4. StackBlitz (Codeflow / Bolt.new)
  5. Val Town
  6. Codesphere
  7. CodePen Projects (Pro)
  8. Gitpod
  9. Render
  10. Netlify
  11. DigitalOcean
  12. Vercel
  13. Napkin
  14. Cloudflare workers+pages

Any that I’m missing or any that you think I should rule out, I’d be grateful to hear.

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I was a paying glitch customer, that’s no guarantee

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great list. it would be good if anyone uses those platforms to be able to put a price to them

eg how much to host one always-on nodejs app

as a comparison Glitch Pro let you host 5 always-on sites for $10

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well with onrender you can use uptimerobot to host one 24/7 per account (since you have 750 free hours / 24 = approx 31.25 days)

i personally think its the go-to hosting software

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Firebase was mentioned and Supabase is an open-source alternative.

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Some people have mentioned Cloud Run which competes with other serverless products, and is pretty much free.

But it requires building containers and redeploying, meaning every change takes 2-3mins just to see, and any frontend code included in the app must be built into the container as well, so e.g. changing HTML or an image is a full redeploy. Unless you build it as a REST backend and your frontend static stuff on somewhere like Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages and do XHR requests (CORS, etc).

The killer features for me in Glitch were:

  1. nice built-in editor with changes reflected immediately
  2. frontend and backend on the same platform/project
  3. commandline access to do bulk/tedious tasks
  4. all within the browser

Can’t seem to determine if alternatives have such things. On the positive side I guess I will have to learn how to do CI/CD or interactive development that triggers deployments from a repo, which makes it easier to use basically any platform.

Some notes I may edit later:

Cloudflare workers

Online Code Editor provides a browser-based editor that’s powered by VS Code for Web with real-time preview.

For more complex projects, local development, or CI/CD pipelines, Cloudflare recommends using their command-line tool, Wrangler.

Firebase

Now offers Firebase Studio, a full IDE with live preview.

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Thank you so much for Neocities recommendation, it does look very promising!
Basing my search off of it, I also found Nekoweb. Looks to be similar in idea with seemingly less limits. I have yet to check them out, I am juggling multiple projects right now and struggling to get by (hence I got so desperate to actually hit the forums with my problem).

Will do my best to keep you updated here, but this may take a long while.

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you can also use github sync! personally that’s the best option

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so I have nearly 60 apps that I need to migrate. and about a hundred more that I can let die.

30 static apps can all go onto Netlify without much fuss, just need to download the assets.

the 30 nodejs apps are a nightmare though! at least 10 of them are bots and would need to be always-on, the rest are just websites

thinking of getting a digitalocean server and putting them all on there, with a cloudpanel or similar UI to get the sites set up

anyone else got any plans for migrating a large number of apps?

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i’m just manually moving a few of my projects manually to cloudflare (rewriting the server-side part to work with workers) and letting everything else die

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:cry:

might look at cloudflare too for my bots.

if we had 6 months or a year to migrate this wouldn’t be so bad. 6 weeks is nothing.

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i don’t think cloudflare works for discord bots tho, only actual websites :pensive_face: definitely worth it for anything that does work with it tho.

yeah 6 weeks is NOT enough.

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I don’t think I had seen anyone mention this yet, but I just deployed my node app over on railway and it wasn’t a horrible process. it’s a chatbot for a twitch streamer friend and needs to be very responsive for a few hours every day, so this works well. can host my static stuff there too and shouldn’t be too spendy either.

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so how are everyone’s migrations going?

I’ve done 13 out of 28 static sites, and 0 out of 29 node apps so far

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Using @tiago’s tool, I have downloaded all of my projects.

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but have you deployed them anywhere else? I’ve been putting static sites on Netlify so far

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try cloudflare pages for static websites, for node apps i just rewrote a bunch of them to be either:

  • more modern so i can host them on my rpi
  • be compatible with cloudflare workers
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what is github.dev ? does that live within Github?

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is this ready yet? i have no idea what to do? I need the EASIEST way to migrate all projects, I’m still a newbie starting out in frontend

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@jennwrites Hi Jenn, I’m a complete noob to world of coding (just starting out in frontend devleopment). Is there the simplest way to migrate all projects elsewhere? Without having to download to many files or using the command line or something

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27 days to go! how are everyone’s migrations going?

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Just as a reminder: while it’s 27 days until hosting shutdown, if you haven’t migrated by then you still have until next year to download your projects after hosting shutdown, and you’ll still be able to log into your dashboard and set whatever redirects make sense for however many projects you’ve rehosted somewhere else after the shutdown.

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@ribose hey, thanks for sharing! I’m checking out Neocities and it’s good, is it free to use with unlimited projects? i don’t want to move things over and then be hit with usage quotas and whatnot

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neocities.org/supporter goes over what the free and $5/month plans offer!

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It’s just like https://vscode.dev