Dokku Reviews & Product Details

Dokku is an open-source, self-hosted PaaS that simplifies deploying and managing applications on a server. It uses Docker and a Git-push deployment workflow to provide a Heroku-like environment with less deployment setup.

What languages does Dokku support?

Dokku supports 1 language: English.

What company sizes and industries is Dokku the best fit for?

Dokku’s positive user experience is most represented among small businesses, with additional representation from mid-market and enterprise organizations. The industries with the strongest presence include:

Company size: Small businesses, with some mid-market and enterprise users as well.
Industry: Computer software, internet, and information technology and services.
Other represented industries: Marketing and advertising, alongside a range of other sectors.

How long does it take to implement Dokku across a team?

Dokku can be quick to get live, with under a day the most commonly reported timeframe. Some implementations take longer, depending on the setup.

What customer support options does Dokku provide, and how do users find the overall support experience?

Support experiences with Dokku are mixed. Users describe community channels and contributors as helpful, while others have found troubleshooting difficult or wanted more responsive follow-through on problems.

What features or capabilities could make Dokku even more useful?

Dokku could be more useful with better visibility and easier administration, clearer learning materials, and support for deployments beyond a single host. The recurring improvement requests include:

Multi-host deployments: Make clustering and scaling across hosts easier.
Management and monitoring: Add a more complete graphical interface for monitoring apps and managing deployments.
Documentation and onboarding: Expand tutorials, examples, and guidance for commands and configuration.

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Dennis P.

President

Health, Wellness and Fitness

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/18/2016

"A good docker build platform and deployment platform for standard web apps"

4/5

What do you like best about Dokku?

Its usage of using git and heroku's buildpacks make it simple to deploy standard, small applications. Because it's structure is fairly straight forward to tweak within a standard server configuration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Dokku?

BASH BASH everywhere... while I undertand the usage of BASH because it's the lowest common denominator, some recipes in other languages would be nice (golang and ruby preferrably) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Dokku:

When considering your 6 month roadmap, consider transitioning its usage from your complete deployment platform to a docker build platform that can push images to something more sophisticated. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you?

The business problem is not having to worry about configuring a deployment script for fairly standard MVP applications. And, you can extend the platform fairly easily, so you can get use it reliably in the V1 version of your product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Wyatt C.

Lead Developer

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/18/2016

"Brilliant software, room for improvement"

5/5

What do you like best about Dokku?

I like the ability to easily maintain multiple web services on the same server. Especially with the automatic deployment through SSH, it is the perfect way to have the features of Heroku without the high cost. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Dokku?

When I first started using Dokku, the learning curve was a little steep. Now, since the project has matured a little bit, it is a little better. The project is still young, though, and some large codebase changes still occur and can cause problems if you don't keep going over the documentation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Jacob P.

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/19/2016

"Good but inflexible"

3.5/5

What do you like best about Dokku?

It is somewhat opinionated about how it should be used, which makes it so that it does one thing really well.

Works as an excellent drop-in for Heroku, especially if you don't have any special needs and just want something that will work easily and is free. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Dokku?

If you attempt to not follow the pattern exactly, you'll be fighting the entire time, although that is more of a limitation of Docker, but that would follow through to Dokku too.

As well, if you attempt to use an "unsupported" platform you'll have a difficult time. Normal Ubuntu tools won't be of a help, and if you aren't thinking in the Docker mindset then things like the filesystem will be difficult to grasp. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Dokku:

Know what you're getting into - read up on Docker and maintaining the entire infrastructure. The biggest stumbling block was what to do when a server restarted and the containers were suddenly gone. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you?

Deploying multiple small web applications.

It is very easy, and definitely enforces the idea that everything needs to be in git, and config in environment variables. This becomes difficult when you have to diagnose a problem with the production environment, as you'll end up with a lot of those small git commits. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Online Media

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

4/30/2016

"Dokku for personal and professional projects"

5/5

What do you like best about Dokku?

My favorite thing about dokku is how inexpensively it simplifies application deployment. There are a lot of services out there that market themselves as "effortless deployment" services, most notably Heroku and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. These services work great, but they are often very expensive -- especially when you want to scale. Dokku offers most of the features of these more expensive services at the bare-bones cost of hosting your servers. The price is hard to beat. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Dokku?

I can't say that there's much I dislike about dokku, especially since the software is open-sourced and free. It's hard to complain about charity! But the one thing I would say I'd like to see but don't is an officially supported and local CLI (command line interface), like what Heroku has. This is admittedly a very small complaint, since dokku has a very nice CLI that's usable when you have SSHed into the server running dokku. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Dokku:

Before installing it yourself, try out one of the pre-provisioned dokku images from Digital Ocean. It's super easy to use, and will give you a good sense of what the system is like at virtually no risk. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you?

Some problems I have used dokku to solve: (1) Quickly and cheaply deploying the infrastructure for a multi-million dollar integration-as-a-service application requiring zero-downtime. The full system consisted in 2 Rails apps, and 4 Sinatra apps. Dokku allowed me to quickly deploy all of these systems on the same server, without compromising resources. (2) Deploying my own personal projects, or contract projects that had a shoestring budget and didn't require anything fancy by way of server infrastructure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Federico H.

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/21/2016

"Awesome tool. Really got me focused into what I am supposed to."

5/5

What do you like best about Dokku?

I really like that it simplifies the whole process of continuous deployment. For us developers who really want to focus on coding and creating apps instead of configuring different set of tools Dokku gives us the power to deliver and show changes to customers faster. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Dokku?

Might be still a little immature for every kind of project I guess as it hasn't got to its 1.0.0 version. Still don't know if I would use it as my main tool to build scalable apps. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Stuart O.

Developer, Designer, Owner

Computer Software

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/18/2016

"A simple, self-hosted alternative to Heroku"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Dokku?

Dokku's best feature is by far the simplicity of setup. All you need is a virtual machine with root access and you can be up and running in minutes - no complicated networking, clustering, or disk formatting - just run the install script and follow the basic setup instructions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Dokku?

Dokku has an extensive collection of plugins, however as the project is still in flux a lot, plugins need to stay up to date in order to work properly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Francois L.

Founder

Computer Software

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/18/2016

"Powerful and very easy to use."

5/5

What do you like best about Dokku?

Deploying a web application by *pushing* its associated git repository master branch is very convenient and feels so natural. I knew Heroku users could do this and always envied them for this reason alone! Using Heroku for all my projects have been a no-go for me because of the cost. Dokku offers a similar platform for free! I can install it on a cloud platform such as DigitalOcean, which is very affordable for freelancers or small development teams.

Thanks to Docker, which Dokku is based on, your app(s) lived inside isolated *containers* which give you the portability of a virtual machine, but lighter and with less overhead.

Another great thing with Dokku is the plugin system. You want Postgresql database support? Just install a plugin using the Dokku built-in command: dokku plugins:install plugin-git-url.

Dokku 0.5+ also allows you to run pre-deploy and post-deploy commands using an app.json manifest (as Heroku users can do). This mean, for example, that you can run database migrations automatically on deploy, which you couldn't do before 0.5.

I also like the facts that Dokku uses the same buildpacks as Heroku. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Dokku?

Honestly, there is nothing I dislike about Dokku at the moment. Before version 0.5, there was the fact that I had to run my Rails database migrations manually once the application is deployed, which was quite inconvenient. But now that it is fixed, I'm happy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Dokku:

If you go the Dokku route, keep in mind that your server will have to be administered using mostly Dokku commands... not standard Linux/Unix commands. For example, to check the log files of your application, you don't "cd" to the app directory and check the logs there. Well, you *could*, but you would have a hard time trying to find where your running application is located exactly. Instead, if you want to check your application logs, you use a command like this "Dokku logs myapp". Same thing applies for configuring vhosts, environment variables, etc.

Also, if you don't agree with the "twelve factor app" mindset (http://12factor.net/), you might be disappointed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you?

With Dokku, I am way more productive in my workflow. This piece of software is perfect to run on a cloud platform such as DigitalOcean. I can isolate each project/client on its own Dokku-ready "droplet" instead of having them all configured on one or more dedicated servers.

I personally use Dokku for Ruby On Rails applications and let me tell you it is a pretty good match. I have written a tutorial on my blog to help people getting start with Rails and Dokku (http://www.rubyfleebie.com/how-to-use-dokku-on-digitalocean-and-deploy-rails-applications-like-a-pro/). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Gianfranco P.

Frontend Web Development Mentor

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/19/2016

"Great DIY PaaS built on top of Docker"

4/5

What do you like best about Dokku?

It easy every easy to use and get started. The documentation is great and the contributors are very responsible and happy to help. It supports a variety of Cloud providers and their step-by-step instructions will guide you through those. Their chat rooms (IRC and Slack) will also help you get over any hurdles and find other people with on the same boat.

Sometimes the best thing to do to test if a product works for you is to try it yourself. That's the beauty about Open Source, you can try and see how it was built before you or you company commits on that technology Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Dokku?

It wasn't exactly fitting my use case, which at the moment we only have 4 Wordpress websites and we don't spin up or down very often. Also, I was hoping to do database version control, but I later understood that problem needs to be solved higher the stack, not at the filesystem level. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you?

It would be great that a low-level solution like Docker or powered by docker allows Application developers to sync databases locally and remotely. Fully merge and do conflict resolution. Something like git for databases, but I suppose that needs to know a lot about the individual application operations and database commands. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sean S.

Junior Software Developer

Information Technology and Services

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/18/2016

"Describe experience with Dokku"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Dokku?

Very simple deployment process once it's set up. Allows me to focus on other aspect of the development process. It also opens up my options for deployment solution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Dokku?

Had an experience where the source was down and I couldn't clone it. I also can't find any resources on how to change the domain name or etc after the initial set up. There needs to be a documentation for that ideally with screenshots. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Caleb A.

Software Engineer

Market Research

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/18/2016

"I've used it for home infrastructure deployments"

5/5

What do you like best about Dokku?

Ease of deploying applications with required connected services like DBs or plugins such as Let's Encrypt for automatically securing my applications. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Dokku?

Would like to more easily cluster deployments but that seems to go against the whole keeping it small thing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Dokku:

Cheaper than paying for Heroku if you don't see yourself scaling far and don't have the money for a cloud provider. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Dokku solving and how is that benefiting you?

Not really solving a business problem per se so much as wanting a hassle-free setup for deploying applications on my home infrastructure for myself that was as easy as mod_php and apache but for node.js, scala, ruby, and others. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.