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Comment by mbreedlove | Hacker News Reader

I just migrated a hobby website to Dokku, which also markets itself as a self-hosted Heroku. I was curious how Flynn compared. Fortunately, there was a blog post giving an overview[1]. I get the impression that Flynn has all the benefits of Dokku, but has the ability to scale to multiple servers. It seems like Flynn is obviously better than Dokku, so I guess I get to do that this weekend.

Keeping up with new containerization tech is starting to feel like keeping up with new JS frameworks/tooling...

[1] https://flynn.io/blog/upgrading-from-dokku-to-flynn

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Yeah I really would be cautious, I just did the reverse (Flynn -> dokku), and found that even after re-deploying a few images on Flynn it wasn't cleaning up images and disk space was disappearing fast (was hitting my 20GB linode limit without having half of my apps deployed). So I ended up giving dokku a shot and that thing is lean in comparison, I was able to setup all my apps (about 7 of them) including redeploying some of them many times to get them working, and they only ended up totally around ~10GB on my server. Which left plenty of room for me to also host my music library (~6GB) there too with my music player[1].

[1] http://benkaiser.github.io/stretto/

> re-deploying a few images on Flynn it wasn't cleaning up images and disk space was disappearing fast

I'm really sorry to hear that you switched off of Flynn. We're aware of this issue, and are in the process of fixing several things that can cause it (it only happens when not using an external blobstore backend like S3). Hopefully you'll try Flynn again at some point in the future!

Yeah I did pop in on Github and report it to you guys[1] and I did really appreciate the speed in which you guys were able to respond to issues. I would like to give Flynn a shot again in the future, but I'll probably at least wait until that issue is solved first ;)

[1] https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/3396

only "starting"? When I chat with my dev friends it sounds exactly the same, just swap nouns here and there.

> so I guess I get to do that this weekend

Why not wait until you encounter a problem that Flynn solves and Dokku doesn't?

From the tone of OP's post, it sounds like he finds it fun or at the very least interesting. Let's not nip curiosity in the bud

Try out Flynn for sure, but from my experience with both Dokku is worlds simpler and more stable.

I think a lot of us feel your same pain.

Has anyone had success with sticking to Dokku for small side projects on DigitalOcean/Linode/etc?

I currently have 16 apps deployed via Dokku on my 8GB Linode and am pretty happy with it. I have a wide variety of apps installed: Node, Django, Rails, and Elixir (Phoenix).

I'd also back dokku for small side projects. I have 4 small slack bots installed on my reserved t2micro instance and I'm pretty happy with it.

Ah, if only people backed Dokku monetarily[1]. I'd probably get my ass in gear and release the multi-server functionality I prototyped over the summer.

Nice to see that others are finding Flynn useful though, there is plenty of space for PaaS offerings, and I truly hope they are financially successful.

[1] My experience in this area is that it's hard to get peple to pay for something that is free, which dis-incentivizes work/releases. I'm not surprised that many use the free version of Flynn, or that there were a ton of Heroku users that left once they stopped getting free resources 24/7. Dokku does take donations - https://opencollective.com/dokku - but to be quite honest, it's almost certainly nowhere near even 1% the amount of money we've saved our users.

Jokes on us, Heroku side projects cost me like a grand since you guys launched :/

I just want to say, that while I haven't financially contributed, that I do appreciate the work that has gone into dokku, and it's a great platform for self-hosting smaller projects on a single vm.

As an aside, you might consider a tool similar to the docker tooling that can help manage multiple dokku hosts on different cloud platforms... People seem to be more inclined to pay for things like that.

People seem more willing to pay for features upfront, so a Kickstarter might be a better way to fund the development of the multi-server functionality. I am yet to use Dokku for anything but I'd contribute to that Kickstarter. (Though I have to say that when I evaluated Dokku I loved how simple it was compared to the alternatives, so if Dokku gets multi-server support I hope it isn't at the price of its simplicity.)

I've had success going from heroku to Dokku on DO. Pricing is pretty much the same and Heroku has mature features so I may switch back at some point.

Are you saying Heroku costs are the same as Dokku on DO? How so?

My app is very small. Typical charges on a $7 hobby dyno were $3-$6 per month. DO is $5 for the droplet.

I'm confused, please explain.

They're two completely different things. I don't know why people think they're the same by any means.

What are two totally different things? Dokku on DO is pretty comparable to Heroku (minus add-ons).

I was on dokku pretty much from the start but my side projects grew to a point where I needed a little more control so I switched to docker with compose files. Dokku is really nice though - they did a great job making deploying as easy as possible.

Can you share any more details on your deploy process? Do you have a production compose file that you use with images pushed to a registry or something similar?

Nothing fancy, I don't deploy often so I just ssh in, pull down the latest code and do a `docker-compose -d -f docker-compose.prod.yml restart` or something like that.

I can't sing the praises of Dokku enough these days. I'm a developer who ran a constantly with a few partners for several years and now I have a day job. I used to maintain about 8-10 VPS scattered all over, with Puppet, but when I took the full time job I moved some clients off and the rest to a single dedicated server, still configured with Puppet and kind of let it sit for awhile.

This wasn't a good place to be so I decided to clean it up and instead of running with Puppet again, I decided to check out PaaS solutions and I couldn't be more pleased with Dokku, I'm currently running JIRA, Confluence, Rails, Node.js, Go, PHP and several static (with middleman/jekyll/etc) sites on a modest VPS at Digital Ocean and I love that I don't have to think about overhead anymore when spinning up new projects. Just `dokku apps:create` and `git push` and it's done. The killer features for the migration for me have been the storage feature for specifying mounts for apps that aren't 12f friendly and the biggest one of all is the Letsencrypt plugin. It's so easy to setup SSL/TLS for new apps that it just feels wrong.

Dokku is amazing, and I'm looking forward to sending some funding to the maintainers.

Edit: forgot to mention in addition to all those apps, I'm also running the necessary backing services, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and Elasticsearch and Kibana.

> Keeping up with new containerization tech is starting to feel like keeping up with new JS frameworks/tooling...

Well, if what you have currently is working fine, you don't need to change anything. You don't actually have to migrate your hobby website to flynn.

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