Having a platform to share my thoughts and work has always been important to me, even when I only have time to use it sparingly. I still like blogging. This blog also has been a great learning opportunity and with its latest upgrade: it’s now running 100% over HTTPS (thanks to Let’s Encypt and being being deployed by Dokku and Docker.

Dokku?

Dokku is a free replacement for Heroku, that you can run on your own server. Without using too many acronyms, it’s an app management tool built around Docker. I started using Heroku back in 2011, when they added support for Python. The simple command line interface for app deployment and free CPU time was a great selling point.

But as costs lowered for servers and with a personal desire to control more of my own tools, for privacy and security reasons, the option to run my own became really interesting.

Some History

There have been three major versions of my blog, with different goals at different times (although using three different programming languages wasn’t the goal, just a coincidence):

• WordPress, PHP, 2006 - 2010ish
• Blogofile, Python, 2010 - 2013
• Middleman, Ruby, 2013 - present

Middleman is still currently being used to generate this blog as a static website, but now with Dokku, it can be deployed and updated via git push, which is really easy and convenient!

Dokku Details

Docker is new hotness that makes deploying code really easy, but it’s still a very manual tool, which is where Dokku comes in. Dokku controls Docker and makes it easy to deploy whole applications; connecting databases, caching servers, or multiple servers together easily. It has a a simple command line interface and support for plugins.

So what this means to me:

• It’s easier to deploy a new server now. Dokku manages app configs, so I closer to having a 12 factor app, where configuration is part of the environment (server) and not part of the app. This makes it easier to keep my source code open.
• I can use plugins to setup SSL or databases correctly. The Let’s Encrypt plugin is really easy to use and makes an already easy process foolproof. I’m a big fan of PostgreSQL but I still have some legacy LAMP apps I’m running that need MySQL. These plugins make it so easy to boot a database and have it backed up automatically to S3. More things are automated, hopefully leaving more time to create new things.
• Best practices and examples are easily shared. The nginx config that is running this blog comes from a github fork, that has continued to be improved overtime.

So I recommend Dokku if you are interested in running webapps easily and controlling your server. You can see this blog’s code on github, if you want to learn more.