external-dns VS Dokku

The second one is a combination of tools: External DNS, cert-manager, and NGINX ingress. Using these as a stack, you can quickly deploy an application, making it available through a DNS with a TLS without much effort via simple annotations. When I first discovered External DNS, I was amazed at its quality.

One of the reasons why I chose Hetzner was that it WAS supported by the ExternalDNS project. I didn't quite understand why the Hetzner provider was pulled, but I saw that an attempt of re-adding it was refused, on the ground that the upcoming webhook architecture would have allowed to better maintain providers.

Write a custom controller for the external DNS controller, or setup some form of ArgoCD app / appset templating.

so I am looking at having an automated way for new routers registered in Traefik to also have the corresponding DNS entry added to my Pihole instance similar to external-dns but obviously, this is exclusive to ingress on k8s environments. my current setup is traefik in a container on unraid.

You technically don’t need to run a load balancer or have a virtual IP for your control plane. If you control your dns, you can add an A record pointing to all IPs for your control plane nodes. It won’t load balance your traffic, but combined with something like External DNS it gives you HA for the control plane.

I normally deploy external-dns, which automatically updates DNS with the ingress controller's external IP address.

Background: Having a look I can see this https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/external-dns

3) Use the Kubernetes External-DNS. I've never used this, but this is assuming it can update DNS for each pods/app to point to the correct Node (it'd need to update my Homelab DNS running on Windows Server)

So here’s the solution I have taken for our current stack. EKS and its dependencies are created through terraform using the eks module as well as provision a route53 subdomain and a wildcard cert. Once we have that created, I have installed this deployment into the cluster via the helm module: https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/aws-load-balancer-controller/v2.4/. This allows me to use kuberentes resources (load balancers or ingress objects) and it will handle all the provisioning of load balancers and security groups for me, based on my application yaml and annotations. We also use https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/external-dns to manage all of our specific host names for the applications through annotations. So to generally put, terraform manages out Kubernetes clusters, and Kubernetes manages the deployment of anything needed for the application including volumes, load balancers, hostnames though Kubernetes system deployments

Metallb for your load balancer (layer2 mode will do) NginX-ingress, will be spot on for internal home apps External-dns to publish your dns record to your Dns server at home, https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/external-dns

Would be great to see a comparison to some better known alternatives like

- Dokku [0]

- CapRover [1]

[0] https://dokku.com/

[1] https://caprover.com/

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.