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Directus has its small-scale and short term benefits, but I can’t recommend building a production-grade app with it. My company uses Directus and we all hate it

by jckahn 2y ago

Directus has its small-scale and short term benefits, but I can’t recommend building a production-grade app with it. My company uses Directus and we all hate it and are desperately trying to get away from it. Avoid.

tjwds 2y ago
Out of curiosity, what don’t you like about it?
- jckahn 2y ago
  Off the top of my head: It surfaces only useless GraphQL error messages to the front end, it’s very frustrating to stand up custom REST endpoints, and the Flow system is painful to develop with and debug. Others on my team have different gripes with it.
  - rijkvanzanten 2y ago
    Thanks for the feedback!
- Davidiusdadi 2y ago
  Since they support so many databases the integration with specific providers is very shallow - e.g. they do not allow to make use of SQL views. I personally found the typescript support disappointing in general but specifically around strict null handling. Their graphql schema was also declaring far to many fields as nullable which was a deal breaker for me looking for at least one way to generate precise typescript typings.
- o_____________o 2y ago
  The eternal red flag of a DB UI that tries to support wildly different backends explains a lot of the problems. Many sane and powerful Postgres features can't be used because Directus also needs to support SQLite, for example. Views not properly supported, search features inadequate, graphql DSL with arbitrary limitations, a lot of weird or dysfunctional relational patterns when something much simpler would do... it's a parallel, inferior system on top of stock pg that is very frustrating when used at some depth.
golergka 2y ago
How does it measure up to Hasura?
- jckahn 2y ago
  No idea, I’ve never used that.
  - golergka 2y ago
    This sounds like a very similar service to Hasura, and I just loved using it. I also have some of former colleagues building it, and they've been one of the best engineers I've ever had privilege of working alongside of. If you're already using a tool that occupies very similar place in your stack, I would really suggest evaluating a migration.
    - jckahn 2y ago
      It does not appear that Hasura is fully open source. I'd much rather use Directus, as I don't consider closed source solutions viable.
jaros 2y ago
I’m in a similar situation. At first it looked very promising and was benefiting us in bootstrapping the project fast but after a while you’re being slowed down by the “extensions” ecosystem. If you have a bunch of complex extensions then building all of them can take 2 minutes (m3 pro MacBook). Forget instant hot reloading.
codr7 2y ago
Not having even the shadow of a control layer in your app is bound to come back and bite you imo.

by jckahn 2y ago

tjwds 2y ago

Out of curiosity, what don’t you like about it?

jckahn 2y ago
Off the top of my head: It surfaces only useless GraphQL error messages to the front end, it’s very frustrating to stand up custom REST endpoints, and the Flow system is painful to develop with and debug. Others on my team have different gripes with it.
- rijkvanzanten 2y ago
  Thanks for the feedback!
Davidiusdadi 2y ago
Since they support so many databases the integration with specific providers is very shallow - e.g. they do not allow to make use of SQL views. I personally found the typescript support disappointing in general but specifically around strict null handling. Their graphql schema was also declaring far to many fields as nullable which was a deal breaker for me looking for at least one way to generate precise typescript typings.
o_____________o 2y ago
The eternal red flag of a DB UI that tries to support wildly different backends explains a lot of the problems. Many sane and powerful Postgres features can't be used because Directus also needs to support SQLite, for example. Views not properly supported, search features inadequate, graphql DSL with arbitrary limitations, a lot of weird or dysfunctional relational patterns when something much simpler would do... it's a parallel, inferior system on top of stock pg that is very frustrating when used at some depth.

golergka 2y ago

How does it measure up to Hasura?

jckahn 2y ago
No idea, I’ve never used that.
- golergka 2y ago
  This sounds like a very similar service to Hasura, and I just loved using it. I also have some of former colleagues building it, and they've been one of the best engineers I've ever had privilege of working alongside of. If you're already using a tool that occupies very similar place in your stack, I would really suggest evaluating a migration.
  - jckahn 2y ago
    It does not appear that Hasura is fully open source. I'd much rather use Directus, as I don't consider closed source solutions viable.

jaros 2y ago

I’m in a similar situation. At first it looked very promising and was benefiting us in bootstrapping the project fast but after a while you’re being slowed down by the “extensions” ecosystem. If you have a bunch of complex extensions then building all of them can take 2 minutes (m3 pro MacBook). Forget instant hot reloading.

codr7 2y ago

Not having even the shadow of a control layer in your app is bound to come back and bite you imo.