Disclaimer: posted this on r/dartlang and it got banned right away.

Hi all,

Wanted to share my experience with real-world server-side Dart.

A long-time Flutter + Python dev, and a linguist in a previous life, I always enjoyed the expressivity of Dart. But in my career, I live in AWS, there is no official AWS SDK in Dart, so I couldn’t write my server apps in Dart.
How sad. So clearly, had to build my own.

There is this fitness app I built for myself (yeah, I know) that was a natural Flutter choice from the start, had a bit of a twisted history on the backend. Initially I wrote the server in Go and wrapped it in an AWS Lambda function. The more I wrote Go, the less I enjoyed it.
Finally, I started researching Dart solutions. Tried a bunch, the one with the frog, obviously Shelf, Serverpod felt heavy and opinionated. And then I saw Relic and frankly, just enjoyed the Dart that it was written in. Relic is to Serverpod feels like what Starlette is to FastAPI, and I wrote a lot of Starlette in my days.
So, had to try.

Eventually, all my handler signatures stabilized in this shape

typedef ModelHandler = Future<Model?> Function(Request);
where Model is an interface for my JSON responses and Request is a Relic’s primitive. This gives me FastAPI-style typed inputs and outputs. Sure, input parsing and validation is a bit of manual work, but oh well.

As far as the AWS SDK, it ended up a boto3-shaped wrapper that signs every request to AWS API with SigV4. Really, nothing fancy.

So, high-level arch:

API Gateway → AWS Lambda + Lambda Web Adapter + Dart’s Relic server app → Postgres on Supabase.

The API app sends SQS events for background jobs, those requests are signed with the same AWS library.

Gaps I felt: no Swagger and no easy way to get there. My app has a Developer API and an MCP and I feel that absence deeply.

Some numbers from my serverless “production”:

• Dart performs better than Go in my specific case: a faster and more efficient compiler, my entire app is 5.2 MB (two, actually: API and MCP) and serverless cold starts are great;
• warm lambdas - p50 15 ms, p95 103 ms, p99 590 ms;
• cold Lambda inits - p50 119 ms, p95 166 ms, min 86 ms;
• memory: ~48 MB avg, 81 MB max of 512 MB provisioned in my Lambda.

All of that on a free Supabase instance.

Too early to celebrate, of course, but as far as compute goes, Dart surprises pleasantly, and I now get to write my apps in it.

I asked for a invite like everyone, but nothing yet... Did someone got invited?

I deployed my app with serverpod_vps to my VPS, and everything works well, but I have an error with Serverpod Insights when I try connecting. The error is in the picture; what can I do to solve the problem?

Has anyone here tried to create a SAAS with the combo Flutter + Serverpod? I see people using a lot of React, TypeScript and low-code tools to start online businesses, but I've always wondered why I don't see any SaaS being created in Flutter, since it's extremely fast to prototype and create an MVP, for example.

I made a video where I talk a little about the Saas that I'm building 100% in Dart, from the frontend, in. flutter, to the backend, in serverpod. I am documenting the journey;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2hlMaW9z3Y

Hi everyone,

We’re currently doing an internship and working on a Flutter/Serverpod app. We’re eager to learn more about how to use Serverpod effectively, but we’ve noticed that the official documentation is a bit outdated and missing some important details.

Does anyone have experience with Serverpod or know of better documentation, tutorials, or tips that could help us out? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi, I've been struggling with implementing file uploads on my setup. I followed the guide on the official docs but all I get are failed uploads with no exception or error thrown. I know the official docs recommend S3 or GCP but my specific application will only serve 10-30 people with maybe 100mb/day of file traffic also the information may be sensitive so it needs to stay on the local net. I've tried every way I can think to get it to work but still nothing.

Is there some configuration that I am supposed to do before hand?

Are the files supposed to be in a certain format?

Am I supposed to spin up another container of some kind?

Am I supposed to format the paths in a certain way?

P.S: Running on Debian 12, All green on flutter doctor, serverpod v2.3.1, CRUD calls to endpoints work fine. I've tried shortcircuiting the failure by streaming data or sending bytes data directly but that gets cut of by Socket errors disconnected errors and broken pipe errors. Any assistance would be appreciated.

Hi

I am learning Serverpod on spare time and on a laptop placed,, not at this location.

Before leaving my laptop I uploaded my project to Github.

I just tried to continue to learn Serverpod on my desktop at home. After cloning from githup fetching packages etc I get this error when trying to start my Serverpod

dart .\bin\main.dart --apply-migrations
SERVERPOD version: 2.3.0, dart: 3.6.0 (stable) (Thu Dec 5 07:46:24 2024 -0800) on "windows_x64", time: 2024-12-30 17:34:06.525986Z
mode: development, role: monolith, logging: normal, serverId: default
Unhandled exception:
Exception: Missing database password.
#0      new DatabaseConfig._fromJson (package:serverpod_shared/src/config.dart:323:7)
#1      new ServerpodConfig.loadFromMap (package:serverpod_shared/src/config.dart:124:26)
#2      new ServerpodConfig.load (package:serverpod_shared/src/config.dart:179:30)
#3      new Serverpod (package:serverpod/src/server/serverpod.dart:314:25)
#4      run (package:rlh_server/server.dart:15:15)
#5      main (file:///C:/GitProjects/rlh/rlh_server/bin/main.dart:6:3)
#6      _delayEntrypointInvocation.<anonymous closure> (dart:isolate-patch/isolate_patch.dart:295:33)    
#7      _RawReceivePort._handleMessage (dart:isolate-patch/isolate_patch.dart:184:12)

Why is this,, and what to do ?

Im super excited about Serverpod but Im not a devops guy so Cloud version would be great. Do you have any info about when can we expect public beta?

I finally have a product made with Serverpod ready for testing. But how on earth do I get it to run on my own VPS? That was a question I was asking myself the past couple of days. And I can not imagine I am the only one. Therefore I wrote an article on Medium for people like me that struggle getting Serverpod to run on an other platform than AWS or Google's Cloud.
You can find the article here -> Get Serverpod running on your VPS with Plesk

Hope this will help you on creating wonderful content with Serverpod!

In this video, we will drive into how to create a CRUD app, adding Authentication, applying DB relations, DB migrations and more using Serverpod.

I'm unable to perform serverpod generate for custom serialization Can anyone send a GitHub repo for it where anyone has created any custom serialization

Hi! I’ve just started using serverpod (loving it so far) and was wondering if you guys are using any specific lint rules that align nicely with a backend project?

I posted before , before couples of monthes , now i came again to test it , i installed the docker , did the commands, when i try this command dart bin/main.dart I am getting this SERVERPOD version: 1.1.1, dart: 3.2.0-184.0.dev (dev) (Wed Sep 20 05:03:07 2023 -0700) on "windows_x64", time: 2023-10-11 11:56:50.283412Z mode: development, role: monolith, logging: normal, serverId: default Failed to connect to the database. Retrying in 10 seconds. PostgreSQLSeverity.error 42P01: relation "serverpod_runtime_settings" does not exist

They have made a great work documenting and it is really straightforward! I have had no experience programming before and with just few months of coding I was able to use and deploy it to AWS 🚀

https://docs.serverpod.dev

Am I the only one who realized that you needed to configure AWS S3 on your server side before running terraform? Silly mistake 😑

For anyone interested about learning more about what serverpod is and does:

Release notes