Git

Running Dokku Locally

Dokku is a self-hosted PaaS (Platform as a Service) that gives you a Heroku-like deployment experience on your own Linux box. A single wget command installs all the necessary tooling. From there, you configure SSH key access, set a git remote on your project, and git push to deploy — Dokku handles the build process, waits for a health check, and performs a zero-downtime swap of the running instance.

It operates on a single host, so scaling is vertical rather than horizontal. In practice this takes you further than you might expect — a modest VPS is capable of running multiple applications simultaneously, and cloud providers can scale resources substantially before Kubernetes becomes a meaningful consideration. If you do need to move beyond a single host, the Dockerfile-based build process keeps your containers portable to GCP, AWS, or wherever you land.