action-doctl VS Dokku

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider catering to developers, offering scalable virtual servers, storage solutions, networking services, and managed Kubernetes clusters. It simplifies application deployment, management, and scaling through its intuitive user interface and CLI (doctl), allowing developers to efficiently utilize cloud resources for their projects.

In this guide, we'll leverage the strengths of Neon serverless Postgres to establish a PostgREST API on DigitalOcean. With PostgREST, a PostgreSQL database is turned into a RESTful API.

A VM is the original “hosting” product of the cloud era. Over the last 20 years, VM providers have come and gone, as have enterprise virtualization solutions such as VMware. Today you can do this somewhere like OVHcloud, Hetzner or DigitalOcean, which took over the “server” market from the early 2000’s. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft's Azure also offer VMs, at a less competitive price. In their case, the VMs are either a building block for other services or the value is in the ecosystem. See the section on public cloud below for more.

Every website or web application you have ever come across on the internet contains code deployed there by someone like you (or by aliens; I can't tell the extent of their involvement at this time) and for you as a web/software developer, knowing how to deploy your code to the streets of the internet via a remote server such as cloud servers is an invaluable skill to have today. There are several decent hosting services around that enable you to properly and securely host your website or web app such as Digital Ocean, Heroku, Vercel (mostly for front-end apps) and chief amongst them, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Hacktoberfest is a month long celebration during October each year. 2023 is the ten year anniversary of the event and I'm excited that something like this still runs. Hacktoberfest is spearheaded by Digital Ocean. This year, ILLA and Appwrite have joined as the presenting partners.

Next, head over to DigitalOcean’s website and click Sign Up if don’t have an account, or Login if you already have one. I choose to Sign up with GitHub

Hacktoberfest, started by DigitalOcean, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year 🥳 It is an annual event that celebrates open-source software development by having developers actively contribute to open-source projects. As of last year alone, there were over 147,000 participants.

My transitioning to MongoDB was swift and straightforward, primarily due to my prior use of the Repository pattern; I only had to update a single file. I was optimistic with that my MongoDB setup would be long-lasting. However, the unforeseen circumstances surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to my server crashing, resulted loss of the most of my data and projects. Fortunately I've since managed to recover and relocate everything I could to Digital Ocean (My referral link). So now everything is back in operation.

If you want to dig into it anyways, Dokku is an interesting mention. They provide an Open Source PaaS that you can install on your server to simplify self hosting containers.

When I came across Coolify, I thought of giving it a try. I am aware of Dokku, but I never really tried it because it doesn't have a UI. I work primarily as a UI developer, so having a nice UI to work with is a plus for me.

I run all my projects on Dokku. It’s a sweet spot for me between a barebones VPS with Docker Compose and something a lot more complicated like k8s. Dokku comes with a bunch of solid plugins for databases that handle backups and such. Zero downtime deploys, TLS cert management, reverse proxies, all out of the box. It’s simple enough to understand in a weekend and has been quietly maintained for many years. The only downside is it’s meant mostly for single server deployments, but I’ve never needed another server so far.

https://dokku.com/

Yeah there are a bunch of selfhostable things:

Caprover (https://caprover.com/)

Dokku (https://github.com/dokku/dokku)

But people still choose Netlify and Vercel for ease of use I think.

Maybe we need something that's just Netlify. The closest I've seen to the "right" UX is Ness:

https://ness.sh

The modern iteration of these tools has taken the developer experience learnings from the Platform as a Service (PaaS) category, and will bring them to your own VM, giving you your own personal PaaS. Example of this include Dokku, Coolify, Caprover, Cloud66 and many more!

Based on the fact that your ideal is to have a similar experience to heroku than managing your own server setting up reverse proxies take a look at these options:

1) https://dokku.com - lets you turn your light sail instance basically into heroku

2) https://render.com

3) https://fly.io

4) If you have aws credits this is their heroku equivalent: https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk

above is not what I do but would be the options I would pursue if I understand your preference and requirement correctly.

All in all, I really recommend trying out Dokku if you are a developer interested in hosting your own projects. It makes it super easy to get everything you need to get up and running without having to worry about the specifics. And the price is impossible to beat!

The installation instructions are on the frontpage of our site. Thats basically all you need to do to install Dokku. As far as using it, we have a simplified tutorial here.

Dokku is a lightweight and open-source PaaS platform that simplifies application deployment by leveraging Docker. With Dokku, developers can easily push their applications using Git, allowing Dokku to build and run them in isolated containers. Its CLI-only approach and plugin architecture make it highly extensible. Dokku's modular plugins enable features like database integration, Let's Encrypt SSL certificates, and automated Slack notifications, giving developers flexibility and control over their PaaS environment.