Dokku VS dokku-letsencrypt

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/

# plugin installation requires root, hence the user change sudo dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-letsencrypt.git

downloads and installs dokku-letsencrypt on server

$ sudo dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-letsencrypt.git $ dokku config:set --global [email protected] $ dokku domains:set app-name your-domain.com $ dokku letsencrypt:enable app-name $ dokku letsencrypt:cron-job --add

You need SSL certificate for your website. With Dokku you can add it in several ways, using official Let's Encypt plugin, or using your own certificate, or using a Cloudflare SSL. Any of these do, but don't neglect this step.

There are env vars you need to configure so let’s encrypt knows your email address. The plugin docs are worth reading: https://github.com/dokku/dokku-letsencrypt

# on Dokku host sudo dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-letsencrypt.git

Right now (when I wrote this post), there is no wildcard support from dokku-letsencrypt plugin. Luckily, Dokku itself can use certificates from other sources.

As you may have noticed, our application is available on our Dokku host now – but only in an unencrypted fashion (note the lack of https in the address bar). Thankfully, we live in the age of LetsEncrypt offering free TLS certificates, and Dokku makes it easy to enable automatic certificate retrieval and setup for our application via the dokku-letsencrypt plugin. I strongly recommend setting up this plugin so that people using our application can enjoy securely encrypted web-traffic. Once installed (see installation and initial setup instructions), we can enable the LetsEncrypt integration for our application with a single command: