Comment by Smerity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Smerity | Hacker News Reader

I have been using CapRover and love it. I donate to their OpenCollective[1].

For those noting "why don't you just use Linux / k8s / ...", that feels close to the original complaints re: Dropbox on Hacker News[2]. I've run clusters hundreds of nodes in size myself but CapRover gives me the pleasure of not having to sweat the small details. You can get this from other platforms but usually there's a dollar cost tied to each option. When I'm experimenting I don't want to have a dollar cost attached.

Deploys are trivial. The default nginx setup is most of what I'd want to do. LetsEncrypt is a single button click. Monitoring is included by default. If I need to scale up, everything I'm pushing is Docker containers. If I want to experiment, there's great fun in looking at the included "One click apps / databases" and just playing around.

CapRover is just a lovely freeing experience that will do what you need :)

[1]: https://opencollective.com/caprover

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Have you used Dokku before, or did you look at it before settling on CapRover? (I'm just starting to look at both)

I'm a very happy Dokku user, I've been using it for years with no problems, though CapRover seems very interesting.

Given your Dokku experience, do you mostly interact with Buildpacks or Containers? And why?

How do you mean? I never touch the actual containers, I always just let Dokku take care of those, I just push the code with the Buildpack and Dokku handles the rest.

Oh wow, disregard that. I've never even touched buildpacks, didn't really know they were a feature. Everything I use is containers.

There is always a container in the end. But do you actually provide a Dockerfile along with your app code, or do you let buildpack create the container for you (ie. no Dockerfile in your source code)?

Yeah, it's all containers. Here's my template project:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/django-project-template

To chime in here, containers all the way. Started with buildpacks as that seemed like the ultimate zero-conf approach (like Heroku), but very slow, so switched to Containers. Works a charm.

I have experience with Dokku, Flynn (also look at this if you're looking at Dokku), CapRover, k8s, and a tiny bit of Nomad.

I think CapRover has the best experience out of the Dokku/Flynn/CapRover "group". Not a huge Dokku fan. Would use Flynn over Dokku again, but I'd rather use CapRover over both.

https://flynn.io/

If you're intent on using Dokku, there's a useful web console:

https://github.com/palfrey/wharf

I would agree with that. I’ve used most of the various options for a DIY PaaS and also prefer CapRover.

CloudRon [1] is actually really great, but its pricing is prohibitive (and changes frequently) for side-projects, which is when I most want to use something like this rather than just deploying/managing the k8a myself.

[1]: https://cloudron.io/

Would you say CapRover is 'more complicated' or more suited to bigger projects than Dokku? I gave it a good hard look before deciding on Dokku, as my use case was so simple, but wondering whether it'll scale.

> If I need to scale up, everything I'm pushing is Docker containers.

Does CapRover manage a shared storage or do you still manage it yourself (ie. Ceph, gluster ...) ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com