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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Dokku is nice and I used it for a while but recently I've been using CapRover [0] and been pretty happy with it. I only use it on 1 host but it supports multiple. It also has 1-click installs for the usual suspects (drupal/wordpress/etc) and things like spinning up a DB is easy. You can also define a docker file in your repo that you instruct it to build and use. HTTPS is a button click and it automatically sets up virtual hosts for you `<your app name>.<base url you configured>`. It's great for quick prototyping and to get a personal project online.

[0] https://caprover.com/

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Absolutely love Caprover, used it when it was CapDuckDuck.

I basically just lost interest, Firebase does everything I need ultimately. But I'd still argue it's the easiest way to deploy a side project!

Caprover is nice and convenient but security wise, only a single password field is required on the admin console. (See demo here: https://captain.server.demo.caprover.com/#/login) Given this it would be nice to at least make the web admin console only accessible via an IP whitelist, but last time I used it I did not find an easy way to do that.

Can you not firewall the relevant admin webui port?

The admin webui runs on the captain sub-domain so i'm not too sure if that can be firewalled.

How does any of that matter? Firewall the relevant port so that it only allows your connecting IP.

I haven’t used it but it appears to serve everything over the same port. You could block it with a reverse proxy but not with a firewall or layer 4 proxy.

Make a 256 bit password. Problem solved?

I use it and am globally happy with it, the biggest downside being the non-zero downtime deployment.

They say it's because it uses Docker Swarm, I don't know if that's true.

Nice find! What is your impression on reliability? I ended up using dokku in production, but I really like what caprover offers.

It's been pretty reliable for me but I've never used it in production. It's more of a testing grounds-type tool for me or a way to see my work online at a stable URL (which helps motivate me to continue working on something). That's not to say it can't handle production (the multiple hosts aspect certainly indicates it means to support that use-case), just that I can't speak on it.

On thing that's cool (to me) is that I once borked an update of the CapRover admin and while I couldn't get into the dashboard all my projects kept humming along without a care in the world because they were all in their own docker containers. I thought that was pretty neat (all of CapRover runs inside of containers as well and seems to be independent of apps it manages/monitors.

Tried both and like Dokku more. Might make a nice web interface for it for myself.

Checkout ledokku, I still prefer caprover seems more robust at this point. But dokku+ledokku are cool too for self-hosting needs

Dokku Maintainer here:

We have an official (paid, one-time fee) web ui here: https://pro.dokku.com/ . It's under active development.

There are others (ledokku, wharf, bullet, etc.) that folks in the community have developed/maintained, though I cannot comment on them as I haven't used them for more than 5 minutes.

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