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Comment by oezi | Hacker News Reader

My major gripe with dokku is that there is no way to define the configuration in a file rather than executing the commands manually.

Otherwise: totally agree, great tool for self hosting.

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We have ansible modules (https://github.com/dokku/ansible-dokku) that cover the majority of app management if thats what you want. The reason I am hesitant to do it in something like `app.json` is purely because one might expose Dokku to users who only have push access and some of those commands can be fairly destructive.

Disclaimer: I am the Dokku maintainer.

Thank you! I was hoping for something less intimidating than going full ansible/terraform.

Essentially something that captures all dokku invocations and could be transferred to another machine. Is app.json this?

I’d love this feature too. Why not add it as an optional thing to enable and let users decide? Maybe just put a big warning in the docs and make it opt-in?

I really hate adding knobs - it increases the amount of work I need to do to maintain and support the project.

Long term, I'd like to port the ansible modules over to being maintained internally by the dokku/omakase project, and then maybe that could be a plugin that folks could run from within their deploy.

It doesn't cover everything - but I've had great success with terraform and this module. https://github.com/aaronstillwell/terraform-provider-dokku

You can configure almost everything using an app.json file.

https://dokku.com/docs/deployment/deployment-tasks/

I believe they are talking about the Dokku commands that are needed to set up a new Dokku app.

For example for a static site that would be the following:

    dokku apps:create dewey.at
    dokku domains:set dewey.at dewey.at www.dewey.at
    dokku letsencrypt:enable dewey.at

That's also one of my wishes to get improved, currently I just have a long text file where I store them so that if I move servers I can just re-run them if needed.

Could you put them in a .sh file and then just run `sh setup_dewey.sh`? Maybe put `&&` between them so that if one fails, it won't keep running through the script?

> Maybe put `&&` between them so that if one fails, it won't keep running through the script?

Or just add `set -o errexit` at the top of the script. Or use make.

Yep, in theory I think that should work nicely. So the recovery procedure after a server died would be to restore the dokku data directory from backup and then re-run all the commands. I haven't tested that but I think that should do the job.

Right now I keep the list of commands more as a reference to look up things like how I mounted a volume or my naming scheme for data directories.

Exactely, I was really surprised that dokku isn't all based on storing these commands in a config/script which gets executed every time you change something.

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