I stumbled across this post by Hamel Husain on Dokku and immediately wanted to spin up a server to try it. The pitch is simple but compelling: it's essentially Heroku, except you own the infrastructure. Hamel runs his entire deployment setup for LLM consulting work on a $7/month VPS, which is a stark contrast to what Heroku charges these days. What caught my attention is how full-featured it is despite the low cost — automatic SSL via Let's Encrypt, basic auth for password-protecting sites, Docker support, git-based deployments, and the ability to scale workers with a single command. The example of deploying private static sites is particularly useful, since GitHub Pages locks that behind an expensive Enterprise plan. I've been looking for something lightweight and self-hosted to replace a patchwork of deployment hacks, and Dokku looks like it might genuinely be that thing.
This is not a new thing by a long shot. But thw fact that it is published by dhh is a big deal imo. For me it assures me to some extent that it is “correct” and that it will be maintained. From author: “Running Rails from Docker for easy start to development - rails/docked: Running Rails from Docker for easy start to development”
From the readme, this is a promising tool for automating deploymeny of apps to s cloud server. Perhaps one more option post Heroku. They dont mention ruby and rails but imply its covered.