Dokku VS CapRover

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.

Also https://dokku.com/

Finally, I kinda wonder if CapRover is still alive. As I write this it has been over 60 days since there has been any activity on their GitHub.

https://github.com/caprover/caprover https://github.com/caprover/one-click-apps

Looks like Caprover https://github.com/caprover/caprover which has been around for a bit, have used in past. Any notable benefits over it?

CapRover's NGINX doesn't support sticky sessions (see this issue).

All the ways I've found imply dokku or caprover, to run docker for each separate app, Postgres, Redis. It's also so hard to even setup db backups (https://github.com/caprover/caprover/issues/158 https://github.com/caprover/caprover/issues/410).

You should definitely looking for Caprover. It has a really really big App Library. A demo is also available online.

Another possibility would be to use selfhosted caprover (https://github.com/caprover/caprover) for the Website Hosting. Leaves you still with the e-mail problem.