Coolify and friends (Dokploy?) look like nice tools. But I am not very comfortable with them because the state of my server(s) isn't present in code. So, I like NixOS or Ansible more but then they require a bunch of boilerplate and custom infrastructure for setting up production.

Anyone know some infrastructure-as-code framework that makes it easy to spin up and maintain production servers? Something declarative, perhaps, but not Kubernetes?

I’ve been working on doing this with Coolify. There are very few coolify settings to backup, and then all the application configs are stored in /data/coolify. And I use kopia to backup all the volumes. It’s not pretty, and a little hacky, but workable for disaster recovery.

What you are describing sounds more like backups (which is great) but not necessarily a declarative setup.

Yah fair enough. I'm very beginner, and using python lib fabric to push ssh commands.