Bradley Kirton's Blog

Dokku is an extensible, open source Platform as a Service that runs on a single server of your choice. It lets you run your own heruko like platform. This means that deployments become as simple as git push <your dokku remote> <your branch>.

Dokku makes building and deploying your application simple.

• It uses heroku build packs and can figure out how to build you application
• It makes running a reverse proxy very easy
• It makes managing SSL certificates very easy
• It enables blue green deployments by default

Some resources I used when digging into it.

• https://dokku.com/docs/getting-started/installation/
• https://timonweb.com/devops/dokku-appjson-example-for-django/
• https://www.accordbox.com/blog/how-deploy-django-project-dokku/#deploy-project

I put together this set of ansible playbooks to get dokku up and running on a VM.

The playbooks include:

• Setup a VM (Create users and harden SSH)
• Setup Dokku

The dokku playbook doe the following:

• Installs dokku
• Adds the authorised keys from the nonrootuser to dokku
• Creates an application
• Sets the domain for the application
• Installs any additional plugins specified in the group vars
• Adds and configures the lets encrypt plugin for the application