Interview with dax from opennext on the topic from a couple days ago:

https://youtu.be/E-w0R-leDMc?si=uzPEd42V_6wxwV9l

While it's simple to run NextJS as a simple Node process that server-renders everything it's not trivial to run it in the way the Vercel does, including running middlewares specifically on a different edge runtime (as well as supporting the `export const runtime = "edge"` directives); incremental static regeneration (statically pre-rendering some set of routes at build time and then hosting them as static files from a CDN rather than computing them at request time), and so on.

I'm guessing this solution doesn't really do that stuff, but for many apps it's not a big deal if it doesn't.

> nothing specific about next.js

But why do people online complain so much that Next is difficult to self-host? Is it just because self-hosting is difficult, or is it something about Next? I suppose the fancy stuff such as "skew protection", which is probably going to be quite important for anyone using server components and server actions, is going to be fiendishly difficult to achieve.

Why does self-hosting mean not using docker. Some people don't like overhead, but that's not the point. The point is to control your own stack and docker can make it more managable.

If you dont like docker I guess just copy the script in the Dockerfile?