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Dokku with DigitalOcean

Dokku is a mini-Heroku just for you. Run you rown PaaS.

In this set of notes we deploy a demo Ruby on Rails app that uses PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached and Let's Encrypt. You can see it at suggestotron.apps.tulsarb.org.

Sign-up for DigitalOcean:

Use referral link for $10 credit.

Create a Droplet:

  1. One-click apps: Dokku 0.11.3 on 16.04

  2. Size: 2 GB / 1 vCPU for $10 a month

    • Size shouldn't matter to get started
    • Since base $5 droplets are now 1GB

  3. Datacenter: Typically closest to your customer base.

  4. Additional options: Monitoring

    • It pre-installs the agent, can do later too.

  5. Upload SSH Key: cat ~/.ssh/id_ras | pbcopy

  6. Name: tulsarb - doesn't matter too much.

Firewall

Firewalls are under Networking in the dashboard:

  1. Name: doesn't matter, web-app-firewall
  2. Inbound Rules: Turn on SSH, HTTP and HTTPS.
  3. Outbound Rules: Default are okay.
  4. Remove IPv6: Dokku no like.
  5. Apply to Droplets, search for tulsarb.

You should also turn on Ubuntu firewall which has good default rules. It's uft enable after ssh into the server. You can see the rules via ufw status.

DNS

Optional but makes it easier to work with!

A record of apps.tulsarb.org to the IP address.

CNAME record of *.apps.tulsa.org to apps.tulsarb.org.

This let's all of our apps automatically get a hostname of <app-name>.apps.tulsarb.org

Update the OS Packages

apt update # fetch the updates
apt upgrade # apply the updates

Configure Dokku

Initial Setup via the Web:

  1. Visit the IP address via HTTPS

  2. SSH key should be pre-filled

  3. Set the hostname to: apps.tulsarb.org

  4. Enable virtual host naming for pretty URL's like: https://<app-name>.apps.tulsarb.org

Continue Setup via SSH:

SSH into the server via: ssh [email protected]

Install Plugins:

sudo dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-postgres.git
sudo dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-redis.git
sudo dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-memcached.git
sudo dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-letsencrypt.git

Configure Global E-mail Address for all SSL Certificates

dokku config:set --global [email protected]

Configure your Application

Have your application ready to deploy!

Create the application in Dokku:

dokku apps:create suggestotron

Create Services and Link them to Your App:

A service is a Docker container running the specific service such as PostgreSQL or Redis. A link is connecting your application to that service. It let's them communicate plus sets ENV variables for your application to use for communication. There is some work to allow re-using one database service for multiple apps but right now think of it as a new service per application.

# Databases
dokku postgres:create suggestotron-db
dokku postgres:link suggestotrone-db suggestotron # sets DATABASE_URL ENV for you
# Redis
dokku redis:create suggestotron-redis
dokku redis:link suggestotron-redis suggestotron # sets REDIS_URL ENV for you
# Memcached
dokku memcached:create suggestotron-memcached
dokku memcached:link suggestotron-memcached suggestotron # sets MEMCACHED_URL ENV for you

Set any other needed environmental variables:

dokku config:set suggestotron AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=thekey
dokku config:set suggestotron AWS_REGION=us-east-1
dokku config:set suggestotron MAILER_HOST=smtp.server.com
# etc...

Deploy your Application

Configure git remotes:

git remote add dokku [email protected]:suggestotron

Deploy:

This deploy process looks like Heroku because it detects your app type and uses the appropriate open-sourced Heroku build pack. It uses the Procfile to know how to start processes.

git push dokku master

Setup SSL certificates:

Do this after initial deploy and any domain adds and removes.

dokku letsencrypt suggestotron

Start the Worker Process too:

dokku ps:scale suggestotron web=1 worker=1

Tips

One Off Commands:

Things like Rails database migrations or rake tasks:

dokku run suggestotron rake db:migrate

Deploy Hooks:

You can do things like run migrations automatically. Read more.

Tweak Dokku default scale size:

Dokku only starts one web worker by default, if you don't want to run the scale command (once) you can set the default to start a worker by creaking a DOKKU_SCALE file in your apps root directory:

# /DOKKU_SCALE
web=1
worker=1

Test your app and fix issues:

dokku logs suggestotron -t # tail all logs
dokku logs suggestotron -p web # tail just web process
dokku logs suggestotron -p worker # tail just worker process

Backround worker doesn't auto-restart:

After deploying I noticed the background worker wasnt' restarting. You can restart the whole app with:

dokku ps:restart suggestotron

Run recurring jobs and tasks:

Dokku supports cron for scheduling recurring tasks and jobs. Just read through the documentation for configuration help.

Run dokku commands locally:

Now you don't need to type the app name each time. The dokku command looks for the Git remote and extrapolates the app name. Plus you don't have to be ssh'd into the server for most things. There are many different packages for this client.

gem install dokku-cli

Automatically Upgrade Unbuntu OS:

Run through the installation instructions for automatic uanttended upgrades. Make sure to turn on e-mail notifications. Then when they work turn it on only for errors.