Dokku — Your Own PaaS

Today one of the most popular cloud platforms for web apps development is Heroku. It is highly appreciated by developers because it allows one to deploy a new app as quick and simple as possible. And since the majority of developers prefer spending their time on coding, instead of adjusting a server, this choice becomes quite reasonable.

So there was no surprise when Jeff Lindsay, a developer from Texas, created Dokku. Long story short it is a tool for transforming an ubuntu server into mini-Heroku, written in 100 lines of Bash.

Dokku’s main benefits consist in extremely inexpensive cost of use and simple server deployment. Plus, thanks to following Docker’s paradigms, such app organization chart facilitates the app’s resources scaling process.

So why is Dokku so compact? The answer resides in the fact that all heavy work is done by several components it consists of:

• Docker. The heart of Dokku. Basically it is a container for Linux, that has most of the virtual machine’s benefits, but is less complicated.
• Buildstep. Uses Heroku’s open source buildpacks (a set of scripts consisting of few files). It creates the base images that apps are built on.

• Gitreceive. It is a project that provides you with a git user that you can push repositories to. It also triggers a script to handle that push. This mechanism might resemble the one in Heroku.

To install the latest stable version of Dokku, you need to run the following command:

This operation shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes.

After Dokku has been installed you can easily deploy apps with the help of “git push”. They will be built using Heroku’s buildpacks and then run in containers.

Now you can create your own PaaS that is very simple and handy in use.