Easy Provisioning of new Librehosts

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I was setting up my own cooperative server for a few friends and myself (running the usual: NextCloud, etc), and I noticed just how easy docker is to setup. I configured practically nothing, and everything basically just worked. The only configuration I had to do was to copy and paste an nginx proxy_pass line and pick a subdomain.

It made me wonder, are there tools to make this even easier? I see “self hosting platforms” with app stores, but all (?) of them require custom configuration in addition to docker.

I’m kind of imagining software that lets you drop a bunch of docker-compose.ymls and the least possible amount of configuration into a folder, and have an entire network of selfhosted apps already provisioned and ready to go. Does something like this exist?

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That’s why we develop http://libre.sh since almost 5 years :wink:

Feel free to try and ask questions here or on GitHub, or on our matrix channel :slight_smile:

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Their goal (thinking of FreedomBox and YunoHost) is that you don’t need manual configuration so that “normal users” are able to manage a server. They don’t specialize in docker afaik but that should not concern the user as the webGUI installs, configures and updates the software you want.

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Today I discovered dokku “the smallest PaaS you’ve ever seen”. In case you wonder what the hell a PaaS is, it’s an acronym for Platform As A Service. Huh. Well, so, I was wondering how it compares to Libre.sh, and whether some librehosters have been using it.

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I’ve been using Dokku a lot for hobby projects and it works quite nicely! Advantages are a very easy “git push” deployment interface like Heroku (particularly great for beginners who want to get myfirstwebscript.py on the interwebz immediately). It supports mostly everything that you expect from Heroku including mutistage build packs, all the plugins, post-deploy checks and zero downtime deploys. Downsides are that it is missing a decent standard web UI, has a single point of failure (docker daemon) and doesn’t have any capability to do multipe host orchestration (openshift, k8s etc. do this well). I think it’s a really solid choice for low priority micro services. Feedback on usage is here: https://github.com/dokku/dokku/issues/1878.