Host your own Heroku with Dokku on DreamHost's Cloud

14 December 2016

After hosting a few of my apps on Heroku I quickly became a fan of the platform, and saw why it gets such high praise. The ease of deploying an application straight through Git is amazing. Not having to worry about managing servers, or managing the environment is perfect–it allows a developer to go straight into developing and deploying their apps with minimal hassle.

Heroku has a great free tier that gives developers 1000 free hours per month, great for playing around with the platform and hosting a single app continuously. There are however a few limitations that I went into in my previous post regarding hosting my app. In a few words, Heroku is great for a single hobby application, but hosting more than one hobby application can become pretty expensive. Heroku’s pricing model can be found here. Luckily there is an alternative that gives us all the goodies at a very reasonable price. It will take a little initial effort on our part, but after that it is smooth sailing.

Enter Dokku. Dokku is an open-source mini-Heroku powered by Docker. Once it’s set up on a host, you can push Heroku-compatible applications to it via Git. They’ll build using Heroku buildpacks, and then run in isolated containers. The end result is your own, single-host version of Heroku.

There are a several great SSD cloud computing hosting providers out there like DigitalOcean or linode, but I chose to give a so-called ‘outsider’ a chance. DreamCompute is DreamHost’s all-SSD cloud computing platform engineered around OpenStack and Ceph. DreamHost won me over after seeing their plans and respective prices. In addition, after asking around there had not been any negative feedback. All servers get charged only up to a maximum of 600 hours (25 days) in a given month. To sweeten the deal even more, all accounts receive free unlimited bandwidth, 100GB of block storage, and 80 GB SSD disk space per server instance. For my current needs I will be going with the minimal ‘semisonic’ plan, but here is all of what DreamHost offers:

Flavor/Plan vCPU Memory Hourly Price Max Monthly Price
semisonic 1 512 MB $0.0075 $4.50
subsonic 1 1 GB $0.01 $6.00
supersonic 1 2 GB $0.02 $12.00
lightspeed 2 4 GB $0.04 $24.00
warpseed 4 8 GB $0.08 $48.00
hyperspeed 8 16 GB $0.16 $96.00

With all the janitorial tasks out of the way, let’s get to setting up Dokku on a fresh DreamCompute instance. There are two ways to go about this, one is through DreamHost’s Web UI, and the other is via the OpenStack command line interface.

We will be using the pre-loaded Ubuntu-14.04 image, allowing us to add a post-creation script that installs Dokku automatically. Currently the other available images (Debian-8 and Ubuntu-16.04) are slightly incomplete and require fixing of a few minor things like adding a FQDN inside /etc/hosts, or adding nameservers inside /etc/resolv.conf in order to automate the creation of the instance and installation of Dokku. I have contacted DreamHost support regarding these minor issues, and have gotten a reply that they will be rebuilding the images in question to fix this. Note: Installing Dokku on the Ubuntu-16.04 or Debian-8 images is completely valid, but currently could require a few extra steps.

Web UI

Login to DreamHost’s DreamCompute web control panel, and launch a new instance from the Compute > Instances menu.

Launch a new instance

Select the availability zone, give the instance a name, pick the flavor/plan, and select the Ubuntu 14.04 image:

Add our SSH public key and select the default security group:

Ensure the public network is selected:

In the final tab, add the following post-creation script and replace $YOUR_FULL_QUALIFIED_DOMAIN at the bottom with the domain name you intend to use for Dokku, and click launch.

#cloud-config
apt_upgrade: true

apt_sources:
 - source: "deb https://packagecloud.io/dokku/dokku/ubuntu/ trusty main"
   key: |
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    Version: SKS 1.1.5
    Comment: Hostname: pgpkeys.eu

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    -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
   filename: dokku.list
 - source: "deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo ubuntu-trusty main"
   key: |
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    Version: SKS 1.1.5
    Comment: Hostname: pgpkeys.co.uk

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   filename: docker.list

package_upgrade: true

debconf_selections: |

    dokku dokku/web_config boolean false
    dokku dokku/vhost_enable boolean true
    # set the domain name of the new Dokku server
    dokku dokku/hostname string $YOUR_FULL_QUALIFIED_DOMAIN
    # this copies over the public SSH key assigned to the server
    dokku dokku/key_file string /home/ubuntu/.ssh/authorized_keys

packages:
   - dokku

After a few minutes a new instance will be created and started. From the instances list we can see the asociated IP, and can ssh into our server which is now running Dokku. Please look at the final notes at the bottom for a few clarifications and details.

OpenStack CLI

The second option is to use the OpenStack CLI client.

Add Public Keys and download the DreamCompute credentials file

  • Add our SSH Public Key through the Web UI in the Access & Security > Key Pairs section.
  • Download the DreamCompute credentials file to our working directory from the Access & Security > API Access section or click here. This allows the OpenStack client to connect to DreamHost API endpoints.

Install the OpenStack CLI

  • Detailed instructions on installing the client can be found here.

Create Post-Creation Script

Next we create a dokku-cloudinit.sh script that contains instructions to add Docker and Dokku’s apt repositories and install Dokku with the proper debconf options set. Replace $YOUR_FULL_QUALIFIED_DOMAIN at the bottom with the domain name you intend to use for Dokku.

#cloud-config
apt_upgrade: true

apt_sources:
 - source: "deb https://packagecloud.io/dokku/dokku/ubuntu/ trusty main"
   key: |
    -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
    Version: SKS 1.1.5
    Comment: Hostname: pgpkeys.eu

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   filename: dokku.list
 - source: "deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo ubuntu-trusty main"
   key: |
    -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
    Version: SKS 1.1.5
    Comment: Hostname: pgpkeys.co.uk

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   filename: docker.list

package_upgrade: true

debconf_selections: |

    dokku dokku/web_config boolean false
    dokku dokku/vhost_enable boolean true
    # set the domain name of the new Dokku server
    dokku dokku/hostname string $YOUR_FULL_QUALIFIED_DOMAIN
    # this copies over the public SSH key assigned to the server
    dokku dokku/key_file string /home/ubuntu/.ssh/authorized_keys

packages:
   - dokku

Launch a new instance

Now we are ready to launch a new instance and install Dokku. From our working directory we need to source the credentials file downloaded.

source dhcxxxxx-openrc.sh

Create a semisonic flavor instance based on Ubuntu-14.04. The default security-group specifies the server’s firewall configuration. Replace $YOUR_SSH_KEYNAME with the name of our SSH Public Keys which we added in the first step and run:

openstack server create \
  --image Ubuntu-14.04 \
  --flavor gp1.semisonic \
  --security-group default \
  --key-name $YOUR_SSH_KEYNAME \
  --user-data dokku-cloudinit.sh \
  dokku

After the instance is created and started, our server will be running Dokku. We can see the IP to SSH into by running:

nova list

Final Notes

SSH into our instance with the installed SSH Public Keys using the ubuntu or debian username depending on our OS.

ssh ubuntu@$IP

Verify dokku is installed by running:

dokku version

If there is an error, most likely Dokku is still installing in the background. Everything should be installed in a few minutes, and we can re-run the command again to verify.

At this stage Dokku is now ready to host our heroku-compatible applications in a heroku-like environment for a very afordable price.

Complete documentation on creating, deploying, and managing Dokku apps can be found here.

Happy coding :)


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