Dokku VS Mail-in-a-Box

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.

Also https://dokku.com/

may i recommend https://mailinabox.email ?

I don't see why we are a long way away. At the sandstorm end, we need to get to the point, where all updates (of both sandstorm and the apps) on the user machine are automatic. Much like they are automatic on various OSes (mobile OSes in particular but also MacOS/Windows). This is not impossible if a single OS like Debian-testing is targeted.

Mailinabox [1] almost does it. They target Ubuntu stable, and upgrades are mostly silent. But they needed user intervention when Ubuntu had to be upgraded from 18.10 to 22.04, which was quite challenging.

If sandstorm can get there, then putting it into a RPi box is simple. What's difficult is helping the general public understand the importance of protecting their data, so such a product has a reasonable market.

[1] https://mailinabox.email/

If you have a better solution, for example a good provider who offer agency packages which allows many domains and there is no catch, for example very small disk space, then hit me right away. Otherwise, please share your experience with hosting your own mail service. I found https://mailinabox.email/ and https://www.iredmail.org/ for example, but never had any experience with neither of them.

mailinabox.email works great on a basic vps.