Dokku Reviews & Product Details

Instead of reinventing from scratch (there are an infinite number of ways to deploy code) and forcing our devs to learn yet another method of deployment and configuration, Dokku relies on Heroku's buildpacks and Heroku's approach to deployments. This means we get all the benefits of an open source, well-document deployment methodology and platform but keep control over our servers. Dokku moves forward as the Heroku community does and everyone benefits.

Dokku also enforces a number of good best-practices, such as: each deploy is new container, deploying from a repo, preventing on-the-box changes to live code, and running zero-state containers.

In most cases, the built-in nginx and SSL configurations Just Work and it's pretty easy to tweak things when they don't. It's all just bash under the hood. There's also a rich plugin system which is used for core components so you know it's reasonable and well-tested.

Oh, and the Let's Encrypt plugin is awesome! Secures your website in 5 seconds. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dokku (and Docker) are still in early development and move very quickly. This means there are occasionally some rough edges but bugs are generally fixed promptly (and they welcome pull requests). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have always loved the push to deploy solution from Heroku, but the moment you start adding serious databases, Redis or Memcached cache, logging, etc. the invoices skyrocket. Meet Dokku, a mini-Heroku built on top of Docker. With Dokku, your application will be a Docker container, and it will be linked with other containers (databases, cache,...) much like in Heroku. Choose the cloud provider of your choice (DigitalOcean in our case, where you can create a Dokku droplet directly, ready out-of-the-box), and you have a powerful solution, at a much more reasonable price than with Heroku.

Migration from Heroku is straightforward, and you might only need to adjust some configuration parameters. Dokku uses Herokuish, so basically it understands Heroku buildpacks. Push to deploy works the same (Heroku is faster building the new images, but hey, it will also depend in the machine you install Dokku onto). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing so far. I would like to see more references in Dokku's documentation to Docker, to better understand how the Dokku applications and plugins talk to each other. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ease, and the fact I can have it on my own machines. I tend to lose control and overview when working with containers directly. Dokku gives back, at least the feeling of, control ;-) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I still feel like I don't know what happens when I'm, for example, setting up mysql or postgres (or you name it). Is there another container running for each database? Will it share the process? Is the database accessible from outside? There must be answers somewhere, I know, but I found them either too hard to find, or I was just not concerned enough to look that much. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dokku is extremely easy to get started with. It's basically a self-hosted heroku and you need very little dev-ops experience to get your apps up and running. Great for small developer teams who want to focus less on infrastructure and more on business logic. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

You will hit a scalability wall with dokku at some point if your project continues growing. It does not (nor does it claim to) scale well across multiple hosts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Super easy to deploy applications, customize, and manage. It's the perfect solution for deploying smaller applications managing configurations when you don't want to go for a full blown docker setup.

I love how easy it is to spin up a new application and get everything put together. To get a whole staging site together it takes roughly 50 seconds of work. Spin up a new one, initialize a new mariadb database, and load my database dump file in through stdin. Coming from using a plain VPS where there was a setup requirement it's a breath of fresh air to be able to get something live with no complications. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Would be nice if there was a built-in database backup method. Maybe S3 backed nightly/weekly/monthly/yearly or something? Where it keeps 7 days of backups for nightly, then 4 weekly backups for the last month, then 12 monthly backups for the year, then 1 backup for each year after that? Only real "complaint" even though it'd be fixable via a plugin or something probably. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I absolutely love how easy it is to use Dokku. It does an amazing job at streamlining the deployment process with minimum headaches. Also, since services like Digital Ocean use "One-Click" deployments it's so easy to create a Dokku instance. In my opinion Dokku should be the goto option for bootstrapped startups. It is by far the best, cheapest, and most performant option there is. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There could be some better documentation around the various commands you can run via the command line. Also it would be nice to have better information on DB add-ons such as MySQL. But overall, I would say I am extremely impressed with Dokku. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Painless installation with out of the box 'herokuish' buildpacks and easy plugin use.

At the same time Dockerfile deployments give enough flexibility to power users for building more complex systems. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The lack of scalability to take a small prototype or persona project into a large scale service. This is mainly because of the vertical scalability restriction (no horizontal scalability), but I'm sure it can still perform nicely with a proper (big) droplet/instance deployment on any cloud service provider. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is worthy to get the same environment as production. It helps to continuous integration. Dokku is well documented, easy to understand, easy to make plugins, really good support from community, irc channel, issues, etc. All days has commits and PR merged on github repo. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think it is really complete. Maybe, it should be easier to debug the running app. For example, if I want to debug my app on staging environment, I have to stop the process so container is stopped, too. In order to solve this trouble, we use supervisor plugin to stop process without stop container. But this is not something I dislike, it perhaps is something I am making wrong. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dokku works on the same concept as heroku. If you've ever used heroku then it's quite simple to get into the workflow of dokku. Dokku also takes out a lot of the manual work when launching a new app in docker, with all the plugins that are available it makes creating database credentials a breeze for instance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Right now it's single host, though they're working on swarm support. The default idea is that the app is built on the dokku server (though you can change that by using a static buildpack, where you pre-compile locally). I don't like the idea of not knowing exactly what you deployed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like about dokku is the concept of having a fully featured, pluggable system to both develop and publish your application. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My only real gripe with dokku is the lack of the admin interface for quickly accessible monitoring or even a default index for a list of apps currently deployed to the server. However, this is a minor Quality of Life feature. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.