So far, we have not discussed the stack on which your application will be running. Even though we are talking about it at the very end of this book, it is best not to postpone such decisions to the later stages of the application lifecycle. Ideally, your development environment must be as close as possible to the production environment to avoid the but it works on my machine situation.

By a web stack, we refer to the set of technologies that are used to build a web application. It is usually depicted as a series of components, such as OS, database, and web server, all piled on top of one another. Hence, it is referred to as a stack.

We will mainly focus on open source solutions here because they are widely used. However, various commercial applications can also be used if they are more suited to your needs.