Heroku Alternative: Deploy Apps with Dokku on DigitalOcean

When Heroku announced their (quite reasonable) new limits for free apps, I realized that I would have to find another source of hosting for all the small, low-traffic projects that I currently have running on Heroku. Way back in the day, Heroku was totally free for apps that only required one dyno, but after years of abuse from jerks like me, they dropped that to eventually allowing free apps to run for 18 out of 24 hours per day (which is ok for low-traffic prototypes) and as of June 1, granting a shared pool of free hours.

Since I have such an unreasonable number of apps running on Heroku, I thought it was high time to try out Dokku. Dokku is a Heroku-like tool that allows you to deploy complex apps by simply pushing with Git. It supports Heroku buildpacks directly, so you can transition existing apps without difficulty, and has a number of plugins for datastores and other components. And, thankfully, Digital Ocean provides a pre-installed Dokku image that will spare you the trouble of installing Dokku yourself; you can just spin up a server and start Dokku-ing right away! This article will walk you through setting up a Dokku server on DigitalOcean with your own root domain and deploying a simple static site to it.

Differences between Dokku and Heroku

• Dokku requires at least some comfort level with running your own servers; you may have to modify nginx configurations, manually configure some plugins, or turn to the system tools for debugging.
• Dokku utilizes Docker, which is a fine platform but can add an extra layer of complexity to a server install.
• Dokku requires root access to a VPS to install plugins, run commands, etc.

In short, you're going to need to do a bit more command line setup on Dokku than Heroku --- nothing you can't pick up along the way, but you might need to do some light reading.

Creating a Dokku Server on DigitalOcean

First, log in to DigitalOcean and follow this link to create a new server on DigitalOcean using the preinstalled Dokku app. Dokku requires at least 1GB of RAM, but $10/mo to host all your stuff is a pretty small price.

For your hostname, enter the base domain you want to use to host your apps. Default Dokku apps will appear at <appname>.<hostname> (for example, myapp.example.com). Make sure you own this domain and register it if you need to!

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by Adam Bard via SitePoint