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dokku/dokku
A docker-powered PaaS that helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications
Dokku is a self-hosted PaaS that gives you Heroku-style `git push` deploys on your own server. You get buildpack support, SSL, zero-downtime deploys, and a plugin system for databases and other services — all on a single $5/month VPS. It's for developers who want the Heroku workflow without the Heroku bill.
The plugin architecture is genuinely well-designed — adding Postgres, Redis, or Let's Encrypt is a one-liner, and the community plugin ecosystem is large enough that you rarely need to build one yourself. Builder support is broad: Herokuish, Cloud Native Buildpacks, Nixpacks, Railpack, Dockerfiles, and even Lambda-style functions, so you're not locked into one packaging convention. The project has been around since 2013, is at v0.38 with per-minor migration guides, and still ships updates weekly — that's rare longevity for a self-hosted tool. Zero-downtime deploys via health checks work out of the box without any app-side changes.
It's fundamentally single-server — there's no built-in clustering or multi-node scheduling, so once you outgrow one machine you're looking at Kubernetes or a real PaaS anyway. The k3s and Kubernetes scheduler plugins exist but they're not first-class; the docs and community knowledge all assume the docker-local scheduler. The whole thing is Shell script, which makes debugging non-obvious failures painful — error messages from deep in the plugin trigger chain can be cryptic. Proxy configuration (nginx sigil templates, OpenResty, Caddy, Traefik, HAProxy) has accumulated enough options that understanding what's actually active in your setup requires reading several docs pages.