Dokuen - A Personal Heroku | Hacker News Reader

Dokuen - A Personal Heroku

github.com

113 pointsmichael_fine13 comments

Hey, I wrote this! I'm happy to answer any questions, or you can add issues and/or pull requests on github.

Isn't the whole point of PAAS/IAAS offerings the idea that someone else is responsible for maintaining the underlying platform/infrastructure? Not trying to cut down your idea; just trying to get a better understanding of some typical use cases.

Yeah, that's absolutely the point of PaaS/IaaS things. The point of Dokuen is to be able to deploy those things in a similar environment that is strictly under your control.

My use case, specifically, is that I have one app that has a large amount of personal data in it, and another one that doesn't fit under the terms of use of any of the PaaS providers. They're not going to get any traffic outside of me and a few other people and it's totally fine if they aren't available from time to time.

By using Foreman and Mason in my own environment, I get to use the patterns that those tools provide (buildpacks, Procfiles) outside of Heroku.

> The point of Dokuen is to be able to deploy those things in a similar environment that is strictly under your control.

I'd add that some of us know how dishonest people work, and would never give control of critical items to third parties (because everyone has their price.)

Thanks, and looking forward to trying it out.

Yeah when I read "personal Heroku" I was thinking something along this line: https://my.cloudfoundry.com/micro

This type of setup makes total sense when you work for an enterprise company that spends way too much money on it's own inefficient IT department to use something as awesome as Heroku. You can run this and have your own internal app server that has the git push simple deployment.

Sometimes those other people work for the same company as you.

Does this support the same git post-commit hooks?

Dokuen operates as a pre-receive hook on the receiving git repository, on the server side. This is so that if something prevents your app from building the remote repo doesn't get corrupted by a bad push. Your post-commit hooks on your development repo will continue to work as normal.

At the moment the only additional hook that Dokuen supports is after-build, before app startup. You set it by setting the DOKUEN_AFTER_BUILD environment variable to a command that you want to run. For example, I have one of my apps set to run "rake db:migrate" here.

needs automated aws creation :)

Why not use cloudfoundry.org or openshift.redhat.com/community/open-source ? They seem to be solve the same solution, but have substantial backing. Is there anything they don't do that you needed?

They're far more complex than what I wanted or needed, and they are not out-of-the-box compatible with heroku-style buildpacks or Procfiles. I admit I haven't taken a very close look at openshift but I used cloudfoundry as inspiration for a prototype at work.

The point of Dokuen is not to be a full distributed computing environment, actually rather the opposite. Dokuen is a lightweight system (there are in fact no daemons and less than 1000 sloc) to enable git-based deployments to a single machine.

I like Heroku, but can't use it for my current project because the webapp needs to live in the same EC2 security group as the backend I'm using. So this looks interesting!

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