
Ask HN: Single Server with Filesystem Database? - deepstream
I&#x27;m currently building a software-as-a-service app and using a novel architecture<p>I&#x27;m going to use the unix specifically Debian file system and user accounts as the users database. so basically whenever someone signs up I run a shell script that creates a new user add some to some relevant groups. the benefits are I got password checking baked in and I can save their data as simple files under the user&#x27;s home directory.<p>I&#x27;ll disable shell login as well as whenever I run a workload for the service application I can use the operating system to run that command as the actual user.<p>I just figure it&#x27;s a simple and useful architecture because I get all the benefits of multi-user operating system baked in without having to think about any of that myself. I don&#x27;t have to worry about a database.<p>and if my audience scales then I just move to a bigger instance. plus if I need to debug or support something I can just go into the user&#x27;s home directory and change it easily myself.<p>also looking at the pricing of instances and the pricing of my application this will be affordable and in order to make this happy side business I don&#x27;t need that many paying users.<p>I just figured this is such a good and simple architecture where it&#x27;s all of the one machine and I can manage all myself but I&#x27;m also writing it in the cloud but I could also move it out if I want it. it gets a lot of flexibility and simplicity and I just think it&#x27;s better than you know having a separate database and separate web server and so on.<p>this probably downsides to this so am I asking for ideas about that, so I can handle them before they surprise me.
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nwrk
That sounds, well novel.

I would encourage you to review: (Free tier)
[https://auth0.com/](https://auth0.com/)

(Free tier)
[https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/](https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/)

Review any other proven and secure user auth solution ie.
[http://www.passportjs.org/](http://www.passportjs.org/)

Questions to asks yourself: How it will scale ? Is it compatible with PAM/LDAP
? Let say you want at least two servers for scale or high availability.

How about social login ? How about forgotten password?

How you can delegate the work on it ? (in case, you want more people work on
it in future)

For personal projects, get some paying clients first, worry later.

