How to Setup Your Own PaaS with Dokku and Node and React and Mongodb and Nginx | Hacker News Reader

How to Setup Your Own PaaS with Dokku and Node and React and Mongodb and Nginx

albertgao.xyz

65 pointsalbertgao31 comments

Dokku is great! If you're not concerned running your apps/database one the same node, you're good. There are tons of plugins for different databases (MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, ...), as well as other services like Let's Encrypt. DigitalOcean also offers to install it when creating a Droplet, so it's easy to get started. Manual installation is also straightforward. I've been using it for several years on former-HPC nodes in our University computing center to host small apps made by students.

To add to the example in the blog post, I've played around with containerizing Django with Docker and deploying it to Dokku (Heroku should also be possible I guess): https://github.com/mimischi/django-docker

It's also possible to spin-up your own Sentry instance (open source error tracking) with Dokku (https://github.com/mimischi/dokku-sentry), as well as Minio, a simple S3 clone: https://github.com/slypix/minio-dokku/issues

Dokku seems like a good tool with good developper experience, equivalent to Heroku. It would allow you to quickly experiment. Want to setup a new web app / service ? Heroku-like simplicity, just some clicks and a git push.

Anyone who has tried dokku's postgres database solution ? Where to store state is IMO the big missing piece from these Paas tools. They solve the stateless compute part nicely (with Flynn you can even setup something Dokku-like on multiple servers with automatic failover) but there's nothing offering automatic failover for a database that doesn't require you to be a db admin.

We've been running a Dokku instance on a single node with PostgreSQL on the same host without any issues for years. It's been pretty solid for us.

Right, but that's not a HA/continuous backup solution for the state (PostgreSQL db), so if the machine fails, you lose the database, and all the data since the last backup.

What I'd love is something Dokku-like in simplicity for setting up HA/master-slave postgreSQL. A tool that I just install on two servers and it does everything needed for HA such as replicate continuously.

Even without the HA, just continuous replication, this would be a great complement to Dokku.

I'm a heavy dokku user and I would love the same thing. Just simple replication to another machine in case of failure. A load balancer in front of them would be great for HA but I'd settle for manual fail-over as long as real-time data replication was as simple as dokku makes everything else.

Wouldn't that issue be the case for any DB host?

I've been running it for a couple of years now, and it basically just works. Don't expect too much out of it, though: it's basically just a small but very convenient wrapper around Docker.

If you need replication, failover, automatic backups, scaling, or something of that order, Dokku is probably not what you're looking for. If you just have an app with a handful of users, it's absolutely amazing.

I looked into Flynn as well, but it seemed way too complicated for my use case: it's a bit overkill to spin up three machines when there's probably only one user at a time and it's idle all but 5 minutes a day.

Flynn can be run in single computer mode or any multiple of N+1. The issue with running single computer mode on Flynn is that if the Flynn core modules become unstable (most likely due to lack of RAM), you'll probably need to wait for self healing. In multi computer mode, you can basically kill 2 of the computers and still be functional.

Their standard mode prioritizes your apps over their management layer so if you happen to deploy an app that eats up all the RAM, expect to hard reboot that host in order to get the management layer back.

I’ve used Dokku in production for several months. For single-server app deploys, it works amazingly well.

I recently found out that I could get a 2 GB / 2 Core machine for ~ $15/yr - and my plan is to buy a bunch of them (~ 150 - 200) to make my own cluster for my personal needs, learning and running some stuff I charge $ for.

One thing they didn't mention was specifically MongoDB management - Backing up, restore etc.

Personally I was planning on using Nomad (or K8S if I could get into the GCP K8S Engine Hybrid Cloud Preview) to manage my clusters.

Where can you get that?

I commented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018656

That seems like a great deal. Where did you find it?

I used lowendbox[0] to find great deals.

Then, I automated buying a ton of them into one bill as they generally don't allow you to bulk buy (which lead to a failed bill as it broke their billing. This lead their sales team to contact me to discuss my usage. Then they provided me with a better quote than the one on Lowendbox).

I wrote $15 / yr as that's the "discounted" price on Lowendbox. But if you bulk buy or buy with a commitment for 3 yrs - it's even cheaper (or you can negotiate to get more stuff for the same price). I can't talk about how much I end up paying as we've a special deal based on our usage.

[0] https://lowendbox.com

Can you comment on what provider you ended up using?

For what it's worth, last time I checked pretty much every host on lowendbox is a customer from ColoCrossing (the owner of the site, data center owner) and there's recently been some shady stuff happening over at LowEndTalk (basically forum side) of spammers and other hosts being unbanned by CC (as they own both sites, and operate LEB, LET is mostly operated by volunteers) , and just recently one host offering 3 year amazing deals, similar/better than what you got, operating for little over a year and little bit after BlackFriday where they again we're selling their 3 year deals just completely closed shop, almost without any communication, and CC deleted any mention of them from LEB.

Not exactly saying your host will do the same, but there's a reason almost all the hosts offer same locations (NY, LA and Chicago), and those specs with that price (even without discount) is unbelievable cheap, maybe too cheap

Thanks for the heads up!

I had noticed that almost all of them had the exact same website, emails and billing software. I assumed that it was like how all sites using Wordpress are essentially the same if you take away the flashy JS stuff.

I am currently paying for a year and if all goes well, maybe update to a 3 yr contract. My plan is to architect the cloud in a way that I can immediately migrate / scale to GCP at the first sign of trouble - so my data / customers etc. should ideally not have issues. But from a cost standup, it's definitely going to be difficult.

We use Dokku for a set of services (within a specific scope) at work.

I was highly sceptical of it at first, as I had preferred managing deployments on a lower level—and for some good reasons(similar criticisms with Heroku itself). That said, I have adapted and it's been good. Once we had some customizations in place it worked out great. And the plugins are generally well-done. Very little is too obscured.

I would like to use Dokku and not have to worry about the underlying software maintenance. Are there any companies offering Dokku as PaaS?

...Heroku?

digitalocean.com also has a "marketplace" of many preconfigured droplets (VPS), including "Dokku 0.12.13 on 18.04)

NodeChef does not use Dokku under the hood but you can achieve what you want and more with the platform. https://www.nodechef.com/

Dokku is good but I prefer CaptainRover (previously CaptainDuckDuck).

It solves lots of problem I had with dokku in the past.

What problems were those? We (currently, though this will change _very_ soon) do not have HA support, but otherwise I'd hope that any issues you've had are things we've resolved, or that there are open tickets for them.

Note: I'm the maintainer of Dokku. Feel free to reach out privately with any thoughts as well :)

Excited to hear that HA support is in the works. That's one of the main things keeping me away from dokku for a decent chunk of projects at the moment.

If I restart the server, domain mapping doesn't work properly. I have to stop every container and then restart them again to point to correct domains.

I hope it has been fixed.

I looked at the Dokku website and despite even looking at the docs, I still have no clue what it actually does. I see that a lot with SaaS software or fancy OSS projects. Maybe it's just my German attitude, but I don't want to know how astounding and wonderful your product is, but what it does and how it works!

You don't need to look farther than the homepage to get an idea of what Dokku does:

Once it's set up on a host, you can push Heroku-compatible applications to it via Git. They'll build using Heroku buildpacks and then run in isolated containers.

This is on the homepage, right near the top:

> Dokku helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications

Is there a way we can make what we do more clear?

Am I the only one around here who doesn't even know what the heck "PaaS" is? All this WTFaaS is out of control...

"SP 800-145. The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing" https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2206223

The terms IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are defined under the "Service Models" section.

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