What you'll learn:

What this stack does and what problem it solves

Why Docker Swarm instead of Kubernetes

Why Hetzner and why GitOps

The full tech stack with tool-by-tool rationale

How the repository is structured

The Problem

Every side project or small production deployment starts the same way: you SSH into a server, run some commands, tweak a config, and hope you remember what you did. Six months later something breaks and you can't reproduce the setup. You're firefighting with no audit trail and no way to roll back.

The solution is GitOps — your infrastructure and application configuration live in a Git repository, and changes to that repository automatically trigger deployments. Git becomes your source of truth, your audit log, and your rollback mechanism.

The problem is that most GitOps tutorials assume you're running Kubernetes.…