Deploy apps to your own mini-Heroku with Dokku

dotCloud’s Docker — a project which makes managing Linux containers easy, previously covered here and discussed on episode #89 — is inspiring & enabling a bunch of open source Platforms as a Service (PaaS).

One of the first (and definitely the smallest) of these is Dokku by Jeff Lindsay.

Dokku weighs in at under 1,000 lines of Bash and offers the same git-push-based app deployment made famous by Heroku and emulated by many PaaS providers. After installation and some configuration, you can deploy to your own mini-Heroku using one of the many supported buildpacks.

Here’s what deploying Heroku’s example Node.js app looks like with Dokku:

$ cd node-js-sample
$ git remote add progrium git@progriumapp.com:node-js-app
$ git push progrium master
Counting objects: 296, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (254/254), done.
Writing objects: 100% (296/296), 193.59 KiB, done.
Total 296 (delta 25), reused 276 (delta 13)
remote: -----> Building node-js-app ...
remote:        Node.js app detected
remote: -----> Resolving engine versions

... blah blah blah ...

remote: -----> Application deployed:
remote:        http://node-js-app.progriumapp.com

It’s exciting to see how much can be done with so little code. Dokku is MIT licensed and hosted on GitHub.