LXC VS Dokku

I hope this doesn't affect LXC negatively.

LXC and LXD share plenty of contributors.

https://github.com/lxc/lxc/graphs/contributors

https://github.com/canonical/lxd/graphs/contributors

I use an "unprivileged LXC container" setup on several Debian bullseye hosts. It works fantastic, and each LXC container feels like a real server.

Compare that to Docker's "one-container-one-process" philosophy, reinventing the wheel by awkwardly composing multiple containers.

There is an issue with lxc as stated here: https://github.com/lxc/lxc/issues/4283 and https://github.com/Vanilla-OS/apx/issues/118

I'm currently attempting to enroll my Ubuntu (20.04) (Unprivileged) LXC hosts to my windows AD server but am having difficulty. I'm using SSSD and KRB5 to manage the user directory and authentication. Once joining the domain with realmd, all seems ok, I can use the id command, etc to lookup users and groups and the host appears in Windows Users and Computers. The issue I'm having is with authentication, I believe it to be related to this issue however I don't entirely understand the solution and can't seem to find much else on the matter (Note the method I'm using works fine on full VMs). Would anybody please be able to provide more clarity in layman's terms?

I don't recall having to do any uid/gid fixup last time I made an unprivileged container. I did have to prepare the unprivileged host user, of course, by reserving a range of subordinate uids/gids (/etc/sub?id) and configuring a virtual network interface limit (/etc/lxc/lxc-usernet).

To create the container, I did this:

lxc-create -t download -n -- -d debian -r bullseye -a amd64

Note that this runs the 'download' template, which (IIRC) is better suited to unprivileged containers than the 'debian' template is. The 'download' template will list its available distros if you do this:

lxc-create -t download -n -- --list

Note that some versions of lxc-create may fail with a keyserver error because sks-keyservers.net died somewhat recently. Workaround: DOWNLOAD_KEYSERVER=hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com lxc-create

https://github.com/lxc/lxc/issues/3894

Found this issue and edited the config file of the lxc container:

and on this thread... an different approach is described

https://github.com/lxc/lxc/issues/1629#issuecomment-311379508

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.