Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform

[benbristow]

I've been enjoying using Dokploy recently.

https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy

It's similar to Dokku but has a nice web UI, makes it easier to deploy Docker/Compose solutions and auto LetsEncrypt functionality is built-in by design (not as a separate plugin).

I've also built a GitHub Actions workflow to trigger off a deploy to apps hosted on it (basic cURL command but works well). https://github.com/benbristow/dokploy-deploy-action

And put together some pre-configured Compose files you can deploy for various apps. https://github.com/benbristow/dokploy-compose-templates

[enumjorge]

Apologies for the very off-topic reply, but I can't help but find it a little funny that on a thread exalting a particular tool, the top comment at the time of this writing is a link to another, newer tool. Not that there's anything wrong with sharing the link, but it does seem like here at HN we have a bit of a grass-is-greener thing going on. I would understand it more if the discussion was around how bad a tool is and someone chimed in with an alternative. And it's not like I don't want people to share these other projects but personally on a thread about a particular topic, the comments I find the most useful are those from people with experience in that topic sharing their opinions, tips, etc. In this case, the comment our community found the most valuable on the topic of Dokku seems to be a link to Dokploy, a project that judging by the commit history is new as of this past April.

[nacs]

After seeing a recent HN post about Dokku, I started going into the nitty gritty of deploying it before finding out there is no multi-node support at all. So if you ever get to the point where you want to scale beyond one server, dokku can't do it which seems like most of the point of using a Heroku-ish tool (I've tried k3s in the past but Kubernetes always seemed like overkill for a non-enterprise setup).

I'll check out dokploy now that I see it has multi-node support.

[turblety]

Thanks for the recommendation. I've just given it a try and it looks great. I had tried coolify.io before, but the multi node/swarm support wasn't great, and the registry didn't work. Dokploy seemed to work straight out of the box.

One thing I wish it had to preview deployments though. Coolify had that. But I can live without it.

[elAhmo]

One alternative to this alternative is to use a webui for dokku itself. Such as https://github.com/ledokku/ledokku

[fastball]

Looks nice, but this is quite the security issue:

https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy/releases/tag/v0.7.2

[dewey]

I was looking at many of these "selfhosted Heroku" type of solutions recently and read many HN discussions about the different options (coolify.io, ploi, ...) as I migrated to a new server and always copying, adapting nginx configs got a bit old.

I've landed on Dokku in the end as it's the one with the least amount of "magic" involved and even if I stopped using it I could just uninstall it and have everything still running. Can highly recommend it!

The developer is also super responsive and I even managed to build a custom plugin without knowing too much about it with some assistance. Documented this on my blog too: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/deploying-docker-images-wi...

[interstice]

I have found over the years that trying new software risks immediately running into a road block in real use. There will be some detail or complexity or bug on a semi-basic requirement that goes directly to an issue in github.

Dokku is not one of those, it does what it does well and aside from a couple of cli argument ordering quirks it's been great for my light usage. If I was using it more I'd probably want to configure entire architectures with declarative config files, I have no idea if it can do that though.

[notpushkin]

Dokku is really neat! I've been using it before moving to building my own Docker images and deploying with Swarm. It was also (partly) the motivation behind my own take on self-hosted PaaS, Lunni (shameless plug): https://lunni.dev/

In general, I really love the idea of running all your stuff on a server you own as opposed to e.g. Heroku or AWS. Simple predictable monthly bill really gives you peace of mind.

[jjnoakes]

> In general, I really love the idea of running all your stuff on a server you own as opposed to e.g. Heroku or AWS. Simple predictable monthly bill really gives you peace of mind.

Have you found hosting you like with bandwidth expense caps? I'm looking for something like this but I don't want surprise network bills if I misconfigure something.

[emacsen]

I'm curious as to your thoughts around Swarm.

My concern around Swarm is around the Docker corporation, which appears to be struggling.

As a competitor, we have Nomad, but with the recent IBM acquisition, I'm concerned about Nomad's future.

[mdasen]

Do you mind if I ask why you chose Docker Swarm? I don't know that much about Swarm and I'd love to know what you think about it compared to K8s (in terms of ease, nice things, things missing, etc.)

[password4321]

Related discussion on the front page today: "Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41356239

> Coolify can enable organizations of any size to host an arbitrary number of free, self-hosted software easier than ever.

https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify

> An open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify / Vercel alternative.

[HL33tibCe7]

> It’s often desirable to have HTTPS for your site. Dokku makes this easy with the Let’s Encrypt Plugin, which will even auto-renew for you. I don’t use this, because I’m letting Cloudflare handle this with its proxy.

Hopefully you do use TLS between Cloudflare and your Dokku (even with a self-signed cert or something), otherwise your personal sites (which are apparently sensitive enough to put behind basic auth) are being transited over the internet in plaintext.

[drpossum]

From my understanding Cloudflare can generate origin certs for exactly this purpose and you can add certs to dokku with `dokku certs:add myapp`

[throwitaway1123]

Agreed. It also can't hurt to setup a firewall or EC2 Security Group that only allows ingress from Cloudflare IPs: https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/

Alternatively, you can use Cloudflare Tunnel, and then block all incoming connections.

[umit-cakmak]

Can you issue wildcard certificates with Dokku? It seems like you need to have a proxy domain to register the TXT records, since you do not know the domain of the user in advance.

[andybak]

Genuinely curious what the threat model is here?

[Mackser]

I've been using Dokku for many years. It's remarkably stable and easy to use. I wrote an extensive tutorial on how to deploy various apps and websites with Dokku in 2018 [1] and I'm sure that following the same steps still works 6 years later.

1: https://maxschmitt.me/posts/tutorial-deploy-apps-websites-do...

[realty_geek]

Delighted to see dokku on here. It's an amazing product and the founder is super humble and helpful. I can't afford to throw much money at it now but it would be great if more people supported it financially

[conradludgate]

My experience with dokku was pretty poor. It was quick to start with but on my VPS crashing and restarting, my apps would not relaunch. I'd have to re-run the dokku commands again. Perhaps I did something wrong but I inevitably switched to a single-node k8s setup as it ended up being more reliable

[aledalgrande]

Curious: for this type of infra, what do people use for file/object storage? Using something like AWS would negate all the savings with egress costs.

[apitman]

If you want hosted S3-compatible storage, you should be able to combine Backblaze B2, Wasabi, or Cloudflare R2 with any VPS provider from the bandwidth alliance:

https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

That should alleviate egress costs. Bonus that storage is also way cheaper.

[tdeck]

If your capacity needs aren't very high you can just store data on your web server in a directory

https://dokku.com/docs/advanced-usage/persistent-storage/

[throwaway77385]

Pocketbase (also in a Dokku-powered container) on a Hetzner Cloud VPS with attached storage. Stupidly cheap, very reliable.

[ilovebabyyoda]

minIO can also be self hosted as an s3 alternative. Or host a database. Likely just depends on the type of storage you are looking for

[bpicolo]

Good ol local disk

[mdasen]

Dokku is great, but historically it didn't really handle resilience. It looks like there's now a K3s scheduler (added earlier this year) which would mean I could have use a Kubernetes operator for a replicated database as well as have the app running on multiple boxes (in case one fails). It looks like it'll even setup K3s for you. The docs don't seem to go into it, but hopefully the ingress can also be setup on multiple boxes (I wonder if it uses a NodePort or the host network).

I was sad when Flynn died (https://github.com/flynn/flynn), but it's great to see Dokku doing well.

[oezi]

My major gripe with dokku is that there is no way to define the configuration in a file rather than executing the commands manually.

Otherwise: totally agree, great tool for self hosting.

[josegonzalez]

We have ansible modules (https://github.com/dokku/ansible-dokku) that cover the majority of app management if thats what you want. The reason I am hesitant to do it in something like `app.json` is purely because one might expose Dokku to users who only have push access and some of those commands can be fairly destructive.

Disclaimer: I am the Dokku maintainer.

[imemyself]

It doesn't cover everything - but I've had great success with terraform and this module. https://github.com/aaronstillwell/terraform-provider-dokku

[JonAtkinson]

You can configure almost everything using an app.json file.

https://dokku.com/docs/deployment/deployment-tasks/

[andrewmutz]

I've been using a different tool that provides great developer UX for managing containerized web apps on your own servers. Its dead simple and does things like zero-downtime deploys and remote builds.

https://kamal-deploy.org/

I use it with rails but it works with any containerized web apps.

[dewey]

I've looked into this too, but it always felt like it's best suited for a "one app per server" model, and not really like Dokku which makes it easy to run many workloads on a single server.

Did I misunderstand something there?

[nasir]

I already run multiple apps on a single server with Kamal and it works fairly good. Sometimes there are some issues especially if you use similar resources across system such as redis. But overall it is stable and works good.

[paxys]

Looks neat, but what exactly makes it "serverless"? It's literally an application that you have to run on your server.

Edit: turns out (thankfully) that it's only the author of the article using that term. The project site (https://dokku.com/) is very descriptive.

[efilife]

Same question

> Dokku is an open-source Platform as a Service (PaaS) that runs on a single server of your choice

This is the first paragraph in the article

[stavros]

What makes anything "serverless", when it has to run on a server?

[throwaway77385]

One more upvote for Dokku. Been using it for as long as I can remember hosting things on servers. It is such an incredible piece of software. And open source to boot. If any of my projects ever make money, Dokku will be the first project I'm funding.

[mike31fr]

How does it compare to Coolify? https://coolify.io

[bjornsing]

Why does the title say “serverless” though? AFAIK Dokku is very much a “server platform”.

[AtlasBarfed]

Here's a better question. For people that roll their eyes at the mere mention of "serverless" (like me), what is the value proposition of Dokku over VMs and your own dockers?

Don't convince me it is like AWS serverless. Convince me to give up VMs and docker images.

[chuckadams]

It’s the backend that implements serverless architecture. A serverless server, I guess. Roll your eyes if you like, but “serverless” is still a snappier term than “declarative on-demand server provisioning, configuration, and scaling” and most people are into that whole brevity thing.

[gslepak]

Can someone explain what this is for someone who doesn't know what Heroku is, and why it's called serverless when it clearly requires a server?

[fpauser]

Or simply use traefik + app containers via standard podman + systemd integration:

https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.uni...

https://traefik.io/traefik/

[Pxtl]

I'm going to confess something: I still do it oldschool. A single box with a SQL server and a webserver running on it. I've taken courses in Docker and whatnot but never applied them.

When you're hosting a single-node cluster, what value do these docker-based tools offer? Is it the fact that you can use a dockerfile to declare your OS-level dependencies consistently?

[mixmastamyk]

Yes, cattle not pets, and portability.