
- very straight forward installation on Ubuntu 16.04
- mostly Heroku app compatible
- CLI interface is pretty easy
- easy to handle logs
- has beta plugins for persistence services like Postgres and Redis Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
- sometimes upgrades can get borked
- remote access is still not as easy as Heroku
- documentation can be improved
- persistence plugins are still beta
- doesn't work across hosts Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It's so easy! When Heroku killed their free teir I needed a replacement. This solved my problem for simple apps while I worked on them. You just git push and the application is live on the web. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
This works great for simple applications, but if you need a database you'll need to use plugins. These require a little more configuration than Heroku. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It is really fast way to setup bare server as development/staging environment. It especially good, if your production environment will use some similar technology stack, for example deis/flynn
It has nice plugin system with a huge number of plugins for daily use: Postgres, Maria DB, Mongo, Redis everything works out of box.
Just like heroku, it really simple to deploy with single 'git push', all things happens magically. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It's not easy to monitor states of current containers, all management only possible through command line. Web gui is used only for initial setup, although it will be nice to have web interface for whole management.
Because plugins are supported by community, some of them often out of date, for some tasks (for example postgres db) there are several plugins and it's hard to choose best one. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
When dokku actually works it's good. The plugin system seems promising. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Unfortunately it doesn't work out of the box in a lot of cases - even incredibly typical use cases like installing on vanilla Amazon EC2 instances.
Sadly the team seem a bit too keen to blame user error and less keen on investigating or acting on bug reports before closing them (regarding installation, setup and removal) so there are plenty of duplicate bug reports about it not working with the same types of errors that don't end in any actual changes to dokku.
The debug option rarely seems to help and it's missing simple sanity checks which make it fragile software even when run on a clean installation of a specific version of a specific distribution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Plugin system of Dokku is awesome. I often find it hard to create backing services like databases within a few command. But Dokku's plugin system solved that problem very well. E.g. postgresql plugin has very meaningful default for security, connections and etc. That help a ton when you trying to provision a complete server. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Nothing to dislike. It's doing what it says to do. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Easy of installation, universality of concepts, great plugin ecosystem. Very responsible maintainers, strong community and good stability. It has the more common tools to catch good programmers, I mean almost any modern language and database can be used with this. Also, expanded with additional plugins, which makes it a lot more than a runtime and database container..
Great UX and can be used on low cost hardware quickly to get the job done. It can be used remotely withput SSH-ing into the server, which is something very handy once you get used to it.
I really like the workflow of git-push, using the tools we already know. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Altough some initiatives were ongoing to make a all-in-one package, it ended up failing, with a missing maintainer. And that's something quite inherent to Dokku; it has to be separate components from separate people and sometimes different communities. That's something I dislike but I gladly accept.
The somewhat weird mechanism to add keys from stdin. Would love to automate it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Dokku's slogan is «Docker powered mini-Heroku». It is true: to everybody who knows Heroku, Dokku will be an easy transition. There's one difference though: Dokku runs on your own server. This is possible because of Docker, a lightweight container system. One container, one app; it's that easy.
To those who aren't used to the Heroku workflow, it's not hard: you just add a bit of configuration to your repository (just a bit: a Procfile, which defines what command to run to start your application, and a requirements file — this one depends on the language your app is written in), then push it to your Dokku server, and it gets built automatically. Magic! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Apparently there is nothing I dislike about Dokku at the moment! The architecture is a bit odd, but this won't get in your way unless you'll want to mess with plugins, and if you do, you'll get used to it right away. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I love dokku's simplicity. Dokku allows you to get a simple server up and running in no time, do some configuration and start testing your code! Just the speed and simplicity of Dokku means everything to me. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Unfortunately, Dokku is not multi user. Who has the time to setup Flynn or Deis? So it would have been AMAZING if it were multi user. Especially in a team environment when you want to give specific people access to specific repos, manual work is too hard! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Dokku was fairly easy to get into despite my lack of experience in setting up servers let alone a PaaS. The documentation is fairly clear for the initial setup and for basic functionality. Dokku being free is by far it's biggest selling point but it seemed to be very well made and compatible with a lot of different setups. Deployment was also very similar to Heroku, which is to say it was very simple and painless(although not without issue). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The downsides to Dokku largely come down to it's status as an open source project that is not supported by an army of devs. When I was attempting to deploy a simple test rails app I ran into issues and was unable to find a way to troubleshoot effectively. When I tried deploying a different rails app it seemed to work perfectly fine despite almost identical settings. Overall Dokku seems like a promising and ambitious project but there seem to be quirks that established solutions like Heroku have worked out long ago. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What I like the most about dokku is the similarity with the heroku workflow. I usually start my python and nodejs projects on Heroku free plan and after a while some of them need a migration to a bigger service. Since using Heroku is not always possible, Dokku is great at that point because it allows me to only change my git endpoint. Aligned to some build and deploy automation tools this process is transparent to most developers working in the project. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The initial configuration is sometimes painful for bigger project as it requires a new server most times. At least in my experience, sharing the server with other tools running alongside dokku is not great. This problem is greatly minimized by using Digital Ocean and other cloud providers that offer servers with a working dokku image, but then again, for a small budget having a server only for build control is not always possible. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.