Docker Swarm VS Dokku

When I sought help, a senior engineer simply asked, “Did you deploy it using Docker?” That’s when it hit me: I had missed a critical step. Determined to fix my mistake, I cleaned up the server, removed all dependencies and tools installed initially, and started fresh. This time, I focused on learning Docker.

The official Docker documentation is your comprehensive guide to all things Docker. While it might seem obvious, it's worth highlighting that this is one of the best-maintained technical documentations out there.

Docker Docs

Docker Docs: https://docs.docker.com/

Docker installed on your machine (Install Docker).

We will talk about downloading and getting to run Docker in our next session, but for now feel free to explore their resources on their website!🥰

Docker Documentation

I don't recommend using docker.io today as it will install an older version (at the time of writing this post, it is 24.0.7 on Ubuntu 22.04) and most of the tutorials will show you features based the official version and the official documentation.

In this blog post, we’re going to explore Docker and walk through creating a multi-stage Docker build with a simple Nginx application. If you’re just starting out with Docker, don’t worry, I’ll break everything down step by step so you can follow along!

# download the installation script wget -NP . https://dokku.com/bootstrap.sh # run the installer sudo DOKKU_TAG=v0.35.10 bash bootstrap.sh # configure your server domain dokku domains:set-global your-domain.com # add your ssh key to the dokku user PUBLIC_KEY="your-public-key-contents-here" echo "$PUBLIC_KEY" | dokku ssh-keys:add admin # create your first app dokku apps:create test-app

Use GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Dokku or any CI/CD tool you prefer

I recently acquired a decently large server (512 GB ram, 64 cores), and am looking into self-hosting some web applications -- Invidious, file server, proxy, to name a few.

I was recommended Dokku[1], and after searching I also found several more similar products, like Coolify, DokDeploy, CapRover. I'm pretty new to doing this, so I would like to ask what experience you've had with these.

[1]: https://dokku.com/

Dokku is open source. Its focus lies on making deployments easy with a simple "git push". The user interface is a CLI.

I don't think that's true. I opened https://github.com/dokku/dokku/issues/5008 a while back and Jose didn't seem to disagree.

Addressing your argument directly though: you know that if you spin up a Postgres database for your app, you need to dump the database to disk to back it up (or if you wanna get fancy, you can do a delta from the last backup + a full backup periodically). Anytime a Postgres database exists, you know the steps you need to take to backup that service.

Same with persistent file storage on disk: if you have a directory of files, you need a snapshot of all of those files.

Each _service_ can know how to back itself up. If you tell a Dokku _app_ to back itself up, what you really mean is that each _service_ attached to that app should do whatever it needs to do to create a backup. Then, dokku only needs to collate all of the various backup outputs, include a copy of the git repository that drives the app, tar/zstd it, and write it to disk.

As you pointed out, the user should probably be able to control the backup cadence, where those backups are shipped off to, the retention period, whether or not they are encrypted, etc, but the actual mechanics of performing a backup aren't exactly rocket science. All of the user configurable values can have reasonable defaults too -- they can/should Just Work (tm). There's value in having that work OOTB even if the backups are just being written to disk on the actual Dokku machine somewhere.

> For all the people who are saying you don’t need X and Y - what is the simplest way to deploy a web app using TLS on a VPS/VM?

Depends on your defintion of simplest. In terms of set-up probably someting like https://dokku.com/ . It's a simple self-hosted version of herokku, you can be up and running in literally minutes and because its compatable with herokku you can re-use lots of github action/ other build scripts.

In terms of simple (low complexity and small sized components) just install caddy as your reverse-proxy which will do ssl certs and reverse proxy for you with extremely little, if any config. Then just have your github action push your containers there using whatever container set-up you prefer. This is usually a simple script on your build process like "build container -> push container to registry -> tell machine to get new image and run it" or even simpler just have your server check for updated images routinely if you don't want to handle communication between build script and server. That's the bare minimum needed. This takes a bit longer than a few minutes but you can still be done within an hour or two.

Regardless of your choice it shouldn't take more than 1 working day, and will save you a lot of money compared to the big cloud providers. You can run as low as €4.51/month with hetzner and that includes a static IP and basically unlimited traffic. An EC2 instance with the same hardware costs about $23 a month for comparison (yes shared vs dedicated vCPU, but even the dedicated offer at hetzner is cheaper, and this is compared to a serverless set-up where loads are spikey, which is exactly how we can benefit from a shared vCPU situation).

It seems like a nice Kubernetes setup! But I don’t see how this is comparable to something like Heroku – the complexity is way higher from what I see.

If you’re looking for something simpler, try https://dokku.com/ (the OG self-hosted Heroku) or https://lunni.dev/ (which I’ve been working on for a while, with a docker-compose based workflow instead). (I've also heard good things about coolify.io!)

A good alternative as recommended on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41358020