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I used Dokku on DigitalOcean. Was it worth it? Honestly? No. Would it have been worth it if there was any sort of clear roadmap for the future of Dokku, or any

I used Dokku on DigitalOcean. Was it worth it? Honestly? No. Would it have been worth it if there was any sort of clear roadmap for the future of Dokku, or anything coming out of Flynn other than "a first beta" (which I think I've seen at the top of flynn.io for literally months now)? Perhaps. I eventually got fed up with the lack of direction, ditched Dokku, and went with a pure Docker-solution (which I documented here: https://medium.com/@robringham/how-interviewpad-uses-docker-for-easy-deployments-on-digitalocean-f85e52f3c9da https://medium.com/@robringham/how-interviewpad-uses-docker-...), and I don't feel like I lost much, and I don't regret moving away from Dokku. I feel like I have much more control now (at the cost of the Docker learning curve, which honestly wasn't that bad). From my post on Medium: "It [Dokku] worked great for a basic setup, but ultimately was simply not mature enough — minor customizations were straightforward, but anything past that (particularly around security) involved rolling up your sleeves and being willing to wade through Dokku’s source code (and that of Dokku’s plugins). Lack of direction in the project was another concern — Dokku is on hiatus, with Flynn, Dokku’s spiritual successor, in apparent eternal beta/preview mode." To make up for losing Dokku's nice Heroku-like Git deployment, I rolled my own script-based Docker image swapping system for deployments, which has worked great.

hayksaakian 12y ago
several other comments mentioned https://github.com/dokku-alt/dokku-alt https://github.com/dokku-alt/dokku-alt did you check it out? do you think it could fill in the gaps you mentioned?
- king_magic 12y ago
  Interesting. I haven't heard of it, but it certainly looks interesting. Having ditched Dokku and gone my own way, the one concern I'd have in going back to something like Dokku is that it always felt like there was too much "magic" going on beneath the hood, which made me nervous - particularly with respect to security. RE: security - one thing I had a hard time of figuring out with Dokku was how the underlying Docker system played with firewalls (something I still struggle with, but at least I don't have a layer of scripty Dokku magic between me and Docker now).
  - josegonzalez 12y ago
    Dokku didn't - and still does not - do anything re: firewalls. Thats up to the server administrator to handle. For instance, you might choose to have this on a VPC in AWS, in which case you wouldn't need much of a firewall. Or if you're using this on Digital Ocean where there aren't Security Groups, it would be up to you to setup ipfw or iptables. As far as magic, I'm not sure what you are getting at. The entire source is there for you to look at, and is actually quite readable. I don't write bash all day, but it was quite easy for me to jump in as a maintainer of dokku.
Scaevolus 12y ago
You could probably simplify your deployment script with the `docker rename` command introduced in 1.5.
- king_magic 12y ago
  Good to know - thanks! I'll give that a whirl.

hayksaakian 12y ago

several other comments mentioned https://github.com/dokku-alt/dokku-alt https://github.com/dokku-alt/dokku-alt did you check it out? do you think it could fill in the gaps you mentioned?

king_magic 12y ago
Interesting. I haven't heard of it, but it certainly looks interesting. Having ditched Dokku and gone my own way, the one concern I'd have in going back to something like Dokku is that it always felt like there was too much "magic" going on beneath the hood, which made me nervous - particularly with respect to security. RE: security - one thing I had a hard time of figuring out with Dokku was how the underlying Docker system played with firewalls (something I still struggle with, but at least I don't have a layer of scripty Dokku magic between me and Docker now).
- josegonzalez 12y ago
  Dokku didn't - and still does not - do anything re: firewalls. Thats up to the server administrator to handle. For instance, you might choose to have this on a VPC in AWS, in which case you wouldn't need much of a firewall. Or if you're using this on Digital Ocean where there aren't Security Groups, it would be up to you to setup ipfw or iptables. As far as magic, I'm not sure what you are getting at. The entire source is there for you to look at, and is actually quite readable. I don't write bash all day, but it was quite easy for me to jump in as a maintainer of dokku.

Scaevolus 12y ago

You could probably simplify your deployment script with the `docker rename` command introduced in 1.5.

king_magic 12y ago
Good to know - thanks! I'll give that a whirl.