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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

Is there something like a k1s? What I’d love is “run this set of containers on this machine. If the machine goes down, I don’t care—I will fix it.” If it wired into nginx or caddy as well, so much the better. Something like that for homelab use would be wonderful.

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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/

Just a note: Dokku has alternative scheduler plugins, the newest of which wraps k3s to give you the same experience you’ve always had with Dokku but across multiple servers.

Dokku really is a game changer for small business. It makes me look like a magician with deploys in < 2m (most of which is waiting for GitHub Actions to run the tests first!) and no downtime.

You've basically described k3s, I think. I run it in my homelab (though I am enough of a tryhard to have multiple control planes) as well as on a couple of cloud servers as container runtimes (trading some overhead for consistency).

k3s really hammers home the "kubernetes is a set of behaviors, not a set of tools" stuff when you realize you can ditch etcd entirely and use sqlite if you really want to, and is a good learning environment.

Docker Compose probably fits the bill for that. They also have a built in minimalist orchestrator called Swarm if you do want to extend to multiple machines. I suppose it's considered "dead" since Kubernetes won mindshare, but it still gets updates.

That's basically just a docker-compose.

If you want something crazy all-in-one for homelab check out https://github.com/azukaar/Cosmos-Server

Docker bare bones or docker compose. Run as systemd services and have docker run the container as a service account. Manual orchestration is all you need. Anything else like rancher or whatever are just fluff.

For homelab, Docker compose should be enough

For something more production oriented https://github.com/basecamp/kamal

That's called docker compose

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