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Comment by benbristow | Hacker News Reader

I've been enjoying using Dokploy recently.

It's similar to Dokku but has a nice web UI, makes it easier to deploy Docker/Compose solutions and auto LetsEncrypt functionality is built-in by design (not as a separate plugin).

I've also built a GitHub Actions workflow to trigger off a deploy to apps hosted on it (basic cURL command but works well). https://github.com/benbristow/dokploy-deploy-action

And put together some pre-configured Compose files you can deploy for various apps. https://github.com/benbristow/dokploy-compose-templates

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Apologies for the very off-topic reply, but I can't help but find it a little funny that on a thread exalting a particular tool, the top comment at the time of this writing is a link to another, newer tool. Not that there's anything wrong with sharing the link, but it does seem like here at HN we have a bit of a grass-is-greener thing going on. I would understand it more if the discussion was around how bad a tool is and someone chimed in with an alternative. And it's not like I don't want people to share these other projects but personally on a thread about a particular topic, the comments I find the most useful are those from people with experience in that topic sharing their opinions, tips, etc. In this case, the comment our community found the most valuable on the topic of Dokku seems to be a link to Dokploy, a project that judging by the commit history is new as of this past April.

I find it helpful to have other tools listed. I already know a decent amount about Dokku and clicked on these comments specifically to find out what other tools might be up and coming or otherwise mentioned in the space.

I'm still waiting for something built on a rootless container solution and with everything defined in git (i.e. no or limited cli commands) so that exactly what is being deployed is, at all times, tracked in git.

> I'm still waiting for something built on a rootless container solution

I'm pretty sure you can run both Dokku and Dokkplay using podman. It's a drop-in replacement for docker that runs just fine rootless.

If the topic is "favorite personal serverless platform" then discussion of other offerings is absolutely on-topic.

> Apologies for the very off-topic reply ... it does seem like here at HN ...

There's nothing more HN than filling the first page of comments with discussion of everything except the linked article.

> it does seem like here at HN we have a bit of a grass-is-greener thing

Since it's Hacker News, not Old-But-Stable-Project-News, that seems expected? The other way it also happens, and has been happening forever, I published a new OSS project of mine ~10 years ago, went to the front-page, and 8 of 10 comments were recommending other pre-existing tools.

I think I was respectful enough to word the original comment I made to the difference between Dokploy & Dokku, not just saying one is better than the other. I've used both successfully and think both are great products - just wanted to share my experience. There seems to be an umbrella recently of self-hosting tools like Coolify/Dokku/Dokploy etc. so wanted to contribute to the discussion in that way. Dokploy is also an open-source project so thought the exposure might be positive on a high ranking HN post.

My comment came out crankier than I intended. I do think comments like yours are valuable, and I agree that you were respectful and informative. I'm just genuinely amused that the top comment is for a completely different tool. That's more an observation about how we vote as a community, not about your post. I include myself in that group though as I have in the past been drawn to the new and shiny over the already known.

I came here for the comments actually. I know Dokku and was wondering if someone would post a better alternative.

Same here. Actually I regularly revisit threads about Dokku, Coolify and CapRover because I know that there are references to other projects that I might have missed.

I personally appreciate it - I really like going to the comments to see other approaches and alternatives whenever something is on here. I don't think it's an insult nor do I think it's out of place if done correctly. HN is one of the only places left on the internet where I expect good value in the comments section and this is one of the reasons.

My theory for this, at least in this case when the featured article is about a software program, aka a tool, then it really becomes a discussion about the tools that serve the purpose of that in TFA.

Here's an analogy from the physical realm: "presenting shovel, a customizable tool for removing dirt".

- doesn't work well for rocky terrain, but I'm working on DigBar, which can outperform Shovel in many high performance workloads.

- it's a lot slower than Hoe, if you're only going down 4" of topsoil

- I wrote a custom frontend for Shovel call Flatend, it carries more volume for loose loads

- theres a paid product called posthole that is worth buying if you build fences, uses shovel under GPLv3

The linking of other tools/initiatives for me is half the value of the post

After seeing a recent HN post about Dokku, I started going into the nitty gritty of deploying it before finding out there is no multi-node support at all. So if you ever get to the point where you want to scale beyond one server, dokku can't do it which seems like most of the point of using a Heroku-ish tool (I've tried k3s in the past but Kubernetes always seemed like overkill for a non-enterprise setup).

I'll check out dokploy now that I see it has multi-node support.

Thanks for the recommendation. I've just given it a try and it looks great. I had tried coolify.io before, but the multi node/swarm support wasn't great, and the registry didn't work. Dokploy seemed to work straight out of the box.

One thing I wish it had to preview deployments though. Coolify had that. But I can live without it.

One alternative to this alternative is to use a webui for dokku itself. Such as https://github.com/ledokku/ledokku

I see that the last commit was 2 years ago. Do you know any other alternatives?

Looks nice, but this is quite the security issue:

https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy/releases/tag/v0.7.2

Thank you -that looks significantly less involved than setting up dokku.

For a while dokku was selling a pro version with a web ui and json api. I don't really mind the CLI so while we bought it I don't really use it. I see there hasn't been much activity on pro, I wonder if it is still a focus.

Nice. Why not use a github merge webhook for triggering deploys?

I have actions on my projects to build & publish container images to GitHub's container registry. The deploy trigger from the workflow makes Dokploy get the latest image from the registry and run it.

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