My favorite Python "crime" is that a class that defines __rrshift__, instantiated and used as a right-hand-side, lets you have a pipe operator, regardless of the left-hand-side (as long as it doesn't define __rshift__).
It's reasonably type-safe, and there's no need to "close" your chain - every outputted value as you write the chain can have a primitive type.
x = Model.objects.all() >> by_pk >> call(dict.values) >> to_list >> get('name') >> _map(str.title) >> log_debug >> to_json
Idiomatic? Absolutely not. Something to push to production? Not unless you like being stabbed with pitchforks. Actually useful for prototyping? 1000%.
I suppose you could use the same trick with __ror__ and | (as long as the left-hand side doesn’t define __or__).
x = Model.objects.all() | by_pk | call(dict.values) | to_list | get('name') | _map(str.title) | log_debug | to_json
Broadly speaking, I explicitly wanted to stay in the Coolify world. Coolify is a self-hostable PaaS platform—though I use the Cloud service, as I mentioned—and I really like the abstraction it provides. I haven’t had to SSH into my server for anything since I set it up—I just add repos through the web UI and things deploy and show up in my browser.
Yes, static sites certainly could—and arguably even should—be done way simpler than this. But I have other things I want to deploy on the same infrastructure, things that aren’t static sites, and for which containers make a whole lot more sense. Simplicity can be “each thing is simple in isolation”, but it can also be “all things are consistent with each other”, and in this case I chose the latter.
If this standardization on this kind of abstraction weren’t a priority, this would indeed be a pretty inefficient way of doing this. In fact, I arrived at my current setup by doing what you suggested—setting up a server without containers, building sites directly on it, and serving them from a single reverse proxy instance—and the amount of automation I found myself writing was a bit tedious. The final nail in the coffin for that approach was realizing I’d have to solve web apps with multiple processes in some other way regardless.
I too was skeptical of the motivation until reading this. Given that Coolify requirement, your solution (build static files in one container, deploy with Caddy in another) seems quite sensible.