Hi everyone, I just got introduced to Wappler a few days ago and so far the product and its capabilities look to be very good. But I have a few problems which I don’t have a good answer to.
About the app, I want to create a basic CRUD app that can take food orders on a daily basis from a community of people and the admin can easily setup daily menu and view user orders.
How do I setup user authentication and role based access? I want a phone number+OTP based login.
I understand setting up a database in Wappler. But how do I set it up when I actually deploy the app? For context, I want to use a PostgresSQL db, I understand settting up a local docker container to run it but how to deploy it?
What hosting to use? I am from India and all the users will be from India. What are some cheap hosting options for my case?
Welcome! Wappler is amazing. I’m not an expert, but I wanted to say hi and share my thoughts and get the responses flowing.
For #1, I recommend a paid API verification service for OTP, as you can’t allow the OTP to ever have any downtime or essentially your app is also down. Users may be in India but sign up with a number from a carrier or region you didn’t plan for, and it can be a real headache to fix – I decided it was worth the cost for OTP as a service. Plus, until you have experience to manage a 99.999% level of reliability for your OTP, a service provider using APIs to send/verify the OTP codes is what I’d suggest.
For #2, you don’t probably want to store your DB in Docker unless you’re storing it in an attached volume or unless the data is temporary and OK to lose at any moment. Otherwise, every time you or the host restart your Docker you’ll have a blank database. I don’t know what offerings serve India, but it is more difficult to find Postgresql than most other database types in general … so expect only a handful of choices when you look. I still use PSQL for many reasons, but be aware you probably won’t have many options of managed hosting for postgresql specifically. Unless you understand the ins-and-outs of database backups, restorations, and admin setup, I’d use a managed database service if at all possible until you have a solid setup.
For #3, you’ll want your hosting to be physically near your end users – it can help a lot to have your hosting in the same data center as the database you use, which can help you limit your providers if you go by that ethos when choosing.
Another thing to consider: You might look into the use cases more. Will users be mostly connected via cellular networking? Does the app need to work in offline situations, even for a few moments? If so, CouchDB and PouchDB might be worth a consideration. Postgresql is addictingly powerful, but unless I’m missing something it might not be strictly necessary for this kind of app.
I suggest you look at this series which will cover call the skills you need.
Personally I dont see docker that important, it’s very much a personal choice. I use a VPS, very cheap node hosting ($1) is available from orangehost. I have a video series on how to setup and use that on the wappler YouTube channel.
You can send a OTP by email directly from Wappler without any external service. That’s covered in the below series
Maybe I was overthinking this a bit. All I need is a relational DB and it should seamlessly work when I move everything onto the web. I don’t need anything else in that respect. Can you point me to a guide where I can check how to do that?
About the OTP, it would be an SMS based authentication and not an email based one.
You will need to use an external API to achieve this. With the wappler server side API component this is quite easy (Sorry, no tutorial on that currently)
