linuxbrew-core VS Dokku

I decided to take a few years off work to just build on what I'd like. Perhaps in a startup studio model, so I have a bias for having something that is easily reusable, and that uses tech someone else can pick up and run with easily. I'll probably be in the business of dev/infra tooling.

Currently going with a container image as the minimal deployable unit that gets put on top of a clean up to date OS. For me that's created with a Dockerfile using Alpine image variants. In a way I could see someone's rsync as an ok equivalent, but I'd do versioned symlinked directories so I can easily roll back if necessary if I went with this method. Something like update-alternatives or UIUC Encap/Epk: https://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Development/Computers/docs/sysadmin/.... Anyone remember that? I guess the modern version of Epkg with dependencies these days is https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-on-Linux. :-) Or maybe Nixpkgs: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs?

Deployment-wise I've already done the Bash script writing thing to help a friend automate his deployment to EC2 instance. For myself I was going to start using boto3, but just went ahead and learned Terraform instead. So now my scripts are just simple wrappers for Docker/Terraform that build, push, or deploy that work with AWS ECS Fargate or DigitalOcean Kubernetes.

No CI/CD yet. DBs/backups I'll tackle next as I want to make sure I can install or failover to a new datacenter without much difficulty.

If you need the absolute freshest development tools, also consider checking out Homebrew (easy) or Nix (more complicated). They're alternative package managers that will run happily alongside the default system stuff on most any Linux distro.

I've been running testing for years, but have switched to targetting bullseye so I will be back on stable when it is released. However, I have started installing most packages from linuxbrew now. https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-on-Linux

I've found using homebrew (for linux), it builds pretty easily: https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-on-Linux

homebrew on linux

The first thing you will need is to install mkcert which can be done via homebrew or homebrew for Linux.

Yesterday I installed homebrew and I had to run some commands to export it on my path. This message used to be shown when I opened a terminal but I ignored it since I was bussy with work. Now it looks like I can't even login, any ideas?

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.