8 ms·

Simple web-focused Docker-based mini-PaaS server

71 points by akoenig 12y ago

piranha 12y ago
How does that compare to dokku?
- akoenig 12y ago
  As far as I know it is completely Dockerfile-based, whereas dokku utilizes Procfiles. Therefore you could build and start any Docker container you like.
- darron 12y ago
  Dokku was the inspiration for it. I wanted a simple way to deploy small websites and I really wanted to understand how it all worked together - so I built my own. One major difference (like already mentioned) is that I wanted to use Dockerfiles rather than Procfiles. I wanted to have full control over how it built and ran - and I didn't want to go through slugbuilder / buildstep at the time. It may actually be easier on end users to use Heroku buildpacks and abstract some of the magic - but for our uses Dockerfiles were the best fit. Now, the Tutum team came out with something that even simplifies it even more - and it might be worth looking at: http://blog.tutum.co/2014/04/10/creating-a-docker-image-from-your-code/ http://blog.tutum.co/2014/04/10/creating-a-docker-image-from... I have had that on my backlog for several months and just haven't had time.
  - KickingTheTV 12y ago
    Thanks for the mention! I'm part of the Tutum team, and we actually made an open source project called Boatyard.io It's basically a web UI that builds images from tarballs, dockerfiles, and github repos. We use it internally all the time and we thought we'd contribute back. You can find our post about it here: http://blog.tutum.co/2014/05/26/introducing-boatyard/ http://blog.tutum.co/2014/05/26/introducing-boatyard/ Great job on octohost.io!
dubcanada 12y ago
Does it offer similar features to Dokku or is it more like Deis?
- akoenig 12y ago
  It is more like Deis. A miniature version :)
  - darron 12y ago
    That's the goal - but I was working on this on weekends mostly by myself and I think they have a team working on it full time. Deis is a much more mature choice and is based on CoreOS which is awesome.
instakill 12y ago
Hi. Let's pretend that I'm an intermediate developer with no knowledge about sysadmin or even deployments. How would you break this down and ELI5 [0]. How does Packer fit into all of this (assuming I'd use Digital Ocean). What's Vagrant for? What does Virtual Machine do here? Do I need these three machines on the target VPS or only on my local development machine? To add my DO keys do I need to ssh into vagrant once it's up and running? You provide the octovagrant box, is it secure? Is Vagrant production-ready or is it not part of the production mix? You've got 6 cookbooks listed in the cookbook repo. Do I need all of them? How do I use/install each of them? What does Docker do? Once I've done all of this setup work, how can I push up all of my code to the desired VPS? Do any of the defaults have security provisions and set up ufw rules to only allow port 80 etc [1], disallow root access, only allow ssh access and all of that goodness? If I use this over manually provisioning and securing servers, do I get sane and secure defaults? That's a lot of questions, but I may not be the only one asking them, so if I may so bravely ask, ELI5? [0] Explain like I'm 5 - like http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive [1] Just suspend disbelief about my zero-knowledge about setting up servers
- darron 12y ago
  Yeah - currently deploying it from scratch is a little too hard for most people. I'd like to fix that, but just haven't had the time. I'd honestly love a system that deploys the image for you to the cloud of your choice - with setup for ssh keys and things to make it simple. Just not in the cards timewise at the moment.
  - SEJeff 12y ago
    FYI not everyone wants to run this in "the cloud". I have a LOT of bare metal and want to deploy something like this on bare metal. Please don't forget us users who buy our own hardware!
    - mlitwiniuk 12y ago
      Same here. I'm waiting for clean and nie solution to utilize all spare hardware, I have in my company. It would be great to have simple PaaS running on one machine, it would be awesome to utilize them all. If someone could give me step-by-step instructions / solution how to do this, I would really pay for that (or support open source, if that's the case).
andridk 12y ago
I have to ask. Why isn't it installed via Docker?
- darron 12y ago
  At the time we started, I wasn't happy with running some of the base items inside of Docker. I'd likely change that today if I was starting now - but that was in November 2013 when Docker was much more beta.
sciurus 12y ago
You should add comments to your example to explain what each step is doing.
- darron 12y ago
  If you're talking about this: http://www.octohost.io/screencast.html http://www.octohost.io/screencast.html Then I have detailed what happens more thoroughly here: http://www.octohost.io/theory-of-operation.html http://www.octohost.io/theory-of-operation.html That help?
  - sciurus 12y ago
    I meant your "Advanced quickstart with AWS" on the front page. I can follow what it does, but I expect it's not obvious to many people.
    - darron 12y ago
      There's an entirely explained version here: http://www.octohost.io/aws-install.html http://www.octohost.io/aws-install.html I should link to it from the homepage - that will be added shortly.
milkshakes 12y ago
why the move from ansible to chef?
- miketheman 12y ago
  Because Chef is awesome? (no real answer here, just a fan)
- spicy 12y ago
  I'm curious about this as well – for the most part you usually hear about people having moved to the other way, from Chef to Ansible (personally, still using both). Ansible also (currently) seems a bit more suited for the Docker workflow, so I'd be interested to hear about the developer's experiences with this.
- darron 12y ago
  I have been using Chef for a number of years. I started this project with Ansible because I wanted to learn how to use it. As I went along, I wanted to learn more about TDDing Chef cookbooks with Test Kitchen so I switched back to Chef.
tokenizerrr 12y ago
Is this only for websites? I'm assuming it just executes the dockerfile, and uses the run command. I have set up a hacky bash script myself to do this, but also use it for daemons which don't need to expose any ports. The theory of operation page hints that if no ports are exposed, then the container isn't launched. It would be great if the following would be possible: 1) No ports exposed. Just run some software and that's it. 2) Expose one or multiple http ports with different domains for each. 3) Expose one or multiple tcp/udp ports, which get mapped directly to a host port. I also can't see if there's any support for volumes, but if not, that also seems fairly important. For what it's worth, here[1] is how I handled it, but the project is very sloppy and I do not recommend it's use to anyone since I'm looking to switch ;) [1] https://github.com/r04r/dockah/blob/master/dockah.sh#L35 https://github.com/r04r/dockah/blob/master/dockah.sh#L35 (reads a config file like https://gist.github.com/r04r/d5d0ea6506824e2cf6d9 https://gist.github.com/r04r/d5d0ea6506824e2cf6d9)
- darron 12y ago
  This is mainly focused on websites, but you can launch other items that don't require any ports exposed: http://www.octohost.io/data-stores.html http://www.octohost.io/data-stores.html I added some "magic" Dockerfile comments - this is the one to add in order to not expose anything via HTTP: NO_HTTP_PROXY I am not a huge fan of volumes where data is stored on the box - but you can do it the same way I've described on the page. I think of octohost boxes as app servers - if you have data on it, you should likely have it stored elsewhere. I've used Heroku to store additional data sometimes: http://blog.froese.org/2014/03/17/using-octohost-with-heroku-addons/ http://blog.froese.org/2014/03/17/using-octohost-with-heroku... We've also used remote MySQL servers: https://github.com/octohost/mysql-plugin https://github.com/octohost/mysql-plugin There's lots of ways to do it.
sandGorgon 12y ago
Could you elaborate on what you are using chef for and why you didn't use something like fig. I'm getting a bit overwhelmed by the number of meta tools around docker deployment. Also, and most importantly, how are you handling logging? Is it being persisted on the host volume or is rsyslog-streamed
- darron 12y ago
  Chef is being used to build the VM and put the entire thing together. But after it's built - you never need to use Chef again. Fig didn't exist when I started this and I wanted to mirror the git push that Heroku used. Logging is handled by Docker - and can be sent to services like Papertrail if you use something like logspout: http://blog.froese.org/2014/05/15/docker-logspout-and-nginx/ http://blog.froese.org/2014/05/15/docker-logspout-and-nginx/
darron 12y ago
Finally allowed back in - HackerNews locked me out because I was "Submitting too fast." Needed more karma.

71 points by akoenig 12y ago

piranha 12y ago

How does that compare to dokku?

akoenig 12y ago
As far as I know it is completely Dockerfile-based, whereas dokku utilizes Procfiles. Therefore you could build and start any Docker container you like.
darron 12y ago
Dokku was the inspiration for it. I wanted a simple way to deploy small websites and I really wanted to understand how it all worked together - so I built my own. One major difference (like already mentioned) is that I wanted to use Dockerfiles rather than Procfiles. I wanted to have full control over how it built and ran - and I didn't want to go through slugbuilder / buildstep at the time. It may actually be easier on end users to use Heroku buildpacks and abstract some of the magic - but for our uses Dockerfiles were the best fit. Now, the Tutum team came out with something that even simplifies it even more - and it might be worth looking at: http://blog.tutum.co/2014/04/10/creating-a-docker-image-from-your-code/ http://blog.tutum.co/2014/04/10/creating-a-docker-image-from... I have had that on my backlog for several months and just haven't had time.
- KickingTheTV 12y ago
  Thanks for the mention! I'm part of the Tutum team, and we actually made an open source project called Boatyard.io It's basically a web UI that builds images from tarballs, dockerfiles, and github repos. We use it internally all the time and we thought we'd contribute back. You can find our post about it here: http://blog.tutum.co/2014/05/26/introducing-boatyard/ http://blog.tutum.co/2014/05/26/introducing-boatyard/ Great job on octohost.io!

dubcanada 12y ago

Does it offer similar features to Dokku or is it more like Deis?

akoenig 12y ago
It is more like Deis. A miniature version :)
- darron 12y ago
  That's the goal - but I was working on this on weekends mostly by myself and I think they have a team working on it full time. Deis is a much more mature choice and is based on CoreOS which is awesome.

instakill 12y ago

Hi. Let's pretend that I'm an intermediate developer with no knowledge about sysadmin or even deployments. How would you break this down and ELI5 [0]. How does Packer fit into all of this (assuming I'd use Digital Ocean). What's Vagrant for? What does Virtual Machine do here? Do I need these three machines on the target VPS or only on my local development machine? To add my DO keys do I need to ssh into vagrant once it's up and running? You provide the octovagrant box, is it secure? Is Vagrant production-ready or is it not part of the production mix? You've got 6 cookbooks listed in the cookbook repo. Do I need all of them? How do I use/install each of them? What does Docker do? Once I've done all of this setup work, how can I push up all of my code to the desired VPS? Do any of the defaults have security provisions and set up ufw rules to only allow port 80 etc [1], disallow root access, only allow ssh access and all of that goodness? If I use this over manually provisioning and securing servers, do I get sane and secure defaults? That's a lot of questions, but I may not be the only one asking them, so if I may so bravely ask, ELI5? [0] Explain like I'm 5 - like http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive [1] Just suspend disbelief about my zero-knowledge about setting up servers

darron 12y ago
Yeah - currently deploying it from scratch is a little too hard for most people. I'd like to fix that, but just haven't had the time. I'd honestly love a system that deploys the image for you to the cloud of your choice - with setup for ssh keys and things to make it simple. Just not in the cards timewise at the moment.
- SEJeff 12y ago
  FYI not everyone wants to run this in "the cloud". I have a LOT of bare metal and want to deploy something like this on bare metal. Please don't forget us users who buy our own hardware!
  - mlitwiniuk 12y ago
    Same here. I'm waiting for clean and nie solution to utilize all spare hardware, I have in my company. It would be great to have simple PaaS running on one machine, it would be awesome to utilize them all. If someone could give me step-by-step instructions / solution how to do this, I would really pay for that (or support open source, if that's the case).

andridk 12y ago

I have to ask. Why isn't it installed via Docker?

darron 12y ago
At the time we started, I wasn't happy with running some of the base items inside of Docker. I'd likely change that today if I was starting now - but that was in November 2013 when Docker was much more beta.

sciurus 12y ago

You should add comments to your example to explain what each step is doing.

darron 12y ago
If you're talking about this: http://www.octohost.io/screencast.html http://www.octohost.io/screencast.html Then I have detailed what happens more thoroughly here: http://www.octohost.io/theory-of-operation.html http://www.octohost.io/theory-of-operation.html That help?
- sciurus 12y ago
  I meant your "Advanced quickstart with AWS" on the front page. I can follow what it does, but I expect it's not obvious to many people.
  - darron 12y ago
    There's an entirely explained version here: http://www.octohost.io/aws-install.html http://www.octohost.io/aws-install.html I should link to it from the homepage - that will be added shortly.

milkshakes 12y ago

why the move from ansible to chef?

miketheman 12y ago
Because Chef is awesome? (no real answer here, just a fan)
spicy 12y ago
I'm curious about this as well – for the most part you usually hear about people having moved to the other way, from Chef to Ansible (personally, still using both). Ansible also (currently) seems a bit more suited for the Docker workflow, so I'd be interested to hear about the developer's experiences with this.
darron 12y ago
I have been using Chef for a number of years. I started this project with Ansible because I wanted to learn how to use it. As I went along, I wanted to learn more about TDDing Chef cookbooks with Test Kitchen so I switched back to Chef.

tokenizerrr 12y ago

Is this only for websites? I'm assuming it just executes the dockerfile, and uses the run command. I have set up a hacky bash script myself to do this, but also use it for daemons which don't need to expose any ports. The theory of operation page hints that if no ports are exposed, then the container isn't launched. It would be great if the following would be possible: 1) No ports exposed. Just run some software and that's it. 2) Expose one or multiple http ports with different domains for each. 3) Expose one or multiple tcp/udp ports, which get mapped directly to a host port. I also can't see if there's any support for volumes, but if not, that also seems fairly important. For what it's worth, here[1] is how I handled it, but the project is very sloppy and I do not recommend it's use to anyone since I'm looking to switch ;) [1] https://github.com/r04r/dockah/blob/master/dockah.sh#L35 https://github.com/r04r/dockah/blob/master/dockah.sh#L35 (reads a config file like https://gist.github.com/r04r/d5d0ea6506824e2cf6d9 https://gist.github.com/r04r/d5d0ea6506824e2cf6d9)

darron 12y ago
This is mainly focused on websites, but you can launch other items that don't require any ports exposed: http://www.octohost.io/data-stores.html http://www.octohost.io/data-stores.html I added some "magic" Dockerfile comments - this is the one to add in order to not expose anything via HTTP: NO_HTTP_PROXY I am not a huge fan of volumes where data is stored on the box - but you can do it the same way I've described on the page. I think of octohost boxes as app servers - if you have data on it, you should likely have it stored elsewhere. I've used Heroku to store additional data sometimes: http://blog.froese.org/2014/03/17/using-octohost-with-heroku-addons/ http://blog.froese.org/2014/03/17/using-octohost-with-heroku... We've also used remote MySQL servers: https://github.com/octohost/mysql-plugin https://github.com/octohost/mysql-plugin There's lots of ways to do it.

sandGorgon 12y ago

Could you elaborate on what you are using chef for and why you didn't use something like fig. I'm getting a bit overwhelmed by the number of meta tools around docker deployment. Also, and most importantly, how are you handling logging? Is it being persisted on the host volume or is rsyslog-streamed

darron 12y ago
Chef is being used to build the VM and put the entire thing together. But after it's built - you never need to use Chef again. Fig didn't exist when I started this and I wanted to mirror the git push that Heroku used. Logging is handled by Docker - and can be sent to services like Papertrail if you use something like logspout: http://blog.froese.org/2014/05/15/docker-logspout-and-nginx/ http://blog.froese.org/2014/05/15/docker-logspout-and-nginx/

darron 12y ago

Finally allowed back in - HackerNews locked me out because I was "Submitting too fast." Needed more karma.