Dokku

Dokku describes itself as a Docker powered mini-Heroku and the smallest platform-as-a-service implementation you have seen. It turns one fresh virtual machine into somewhere to deploy applications, without the operational weight of a full orchestration stack underneath it.

Installation is deliberately short. Fetch the bootstrap script for the current stable release, run it with sudo and a matching version tag, then set the global domain and register the SSH keys allowed to deploy. A keypair already present on the machine is imported automatically during installation, and otherwise keys are added afterwards through the ssh-keys command.

A few practical constraints decide where Dokku can run.

• Operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04, or Debian 11 and later, on amd64 or arm64.
• Fresh machine: The installer expects a clean VM rather than a server already busy with other services.
• SSH access: Deployment identity comes from keypairs registered with the platform.
• Unattended install: A documented path exists for people provisioning servers automatically.
• Upgrades: Moving between releases follows its own documented procedure.

Full documentation, including advanced installation, lives online rather than in the README. Questions go to GitHub issues, the troubleshooting guide or the dokku channel on Gliderlabs Slack. The code is MIT licensed and originated with Jeff Lindsay, and pull requests are welcomed as conversation starters even when they are not merged as written.