Running without Docker: what changes

What changes without the Docker stack

Realtime updates — supply your own Pusher

The Docker stack includes Reverb, our websocket server. Shared hosting cannot run it, so use a Pusher account instead — the free tier is enough for most stores. Add the credentials to .env:

BROADCAST_CONNECTION=pusher
PUSHER_APP_ID=your_app_id
PUSHER_APP_KEY=your_app_key
PUSHER_APP_SECRET=your_app_secret
PUSHER_APP_CLUSTER=your_cluster

No rebuild is needed — the application reads these at runtime and the browser picks them up on the next page load. Your app secret stays on the server and is never sent to the browser.

If you leave broadcasting off entirely, the dashboard still works: live tables and notifications simply refresh on request instead of updating instantly.

AI — works, with keyword search instead of vector search

The AI assistant, the chat widget and the reporting tools all work normally. What changes is how documents are retrieved. On PostgreSQL with the pgvector extension, Store Console ranks content by semantic similarity. On MySQL, or on PostgreSQL without pgvector, it falls back to keyword search.

Embeddings are still generated and stored, so nothing is lost — if you later move to PostgreSQL with pgvector, your existing content is already indexed.

Digital products — run the build server separately

If you sell software and use the automated build pipeline, that build server is part of the Docker stack and does not run on shared hosting. You have two options: run the build server on a separate machine and point Store Console at it, or build your release artifacts yourself and upload them to a release. Selling, licensing, downloads and updates all work either way — only the automated build step needs the separate service.

Scheduled work

Horizon's dashboard and its supervisors are Redis-only. On shared hosting the same jobs run through the database queue on a cron job, as set up in Installing on cPanel. You lose the Horizon monitoring UI, not the work it does.

Moving to a VPS later

Nothing here is a one-way door. Your data, licences and configuration move with you — switch the drivers back to Redis and PostgreSQL in .env, run the migrations, and the features above return to their full behaviour.