All 38 Dependencies

Dokku is a self-hosted Platform as a Service that brings the simplicity of Heroku's git-push deployment workflow to a single server you control. It uses Docker to containerize applications and Heroku buildpacks to automatically detect and build them, so you can deploy Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Java, PHP, and dozens of other runtimes without writing Dockerfiles. A simple `git push dokku main` is all it takes to go from code to running container.

The architecture centers on a Unix-philosophy plugin system — every capability from SSL to databases to process scheduling is implemented as a discrete plugin. Core plugins ship with Dokku for git deployment, nginx reverse proxying, domain management, environment variable injection, and zero-downtime deployments. The community has built hundreds of additional plugins for PostgreSQL, Redis, MySQL, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and more, making it possible to run a full production stack on a single $10 VPS.

Dokku has expanded well beyond its original single-server Docker model. It now supports multiple schedulers — Docker local, Kubernetes via k3s, Nomad, and a null scheduler for testing — allowing the same deployment interface to scale from a personal server to a multi-node cluster. Alternative reverse proxies including Traefik, Caddy, and HAProxy complement the default nginx setup. This flexibility has made Dokku a credible self-hosted alternative not just for individual developers but for small teams that need infrastructure control without Kubernetes complexity.

With over 31,000 GitHub stars, 317+ releases, and more than 13,000 commits since 2013, Dokku is one of the most mature and actively maintained self-hosted PaaS implementations available. It runs on Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 and Debian 11+ on both amd64 and arm64, installs in minutes via a single bootstrap script, and provides a complete application lifecycle management solution that includes building, deploying, scaling, logging, SSL, and domain routing.