Ask HN: What's the best way to deploy container-based apps for a small project?

1•pxheller•6mo ago

Hi HN,

For the last couple of months I've been working on a side project I'd now finally like to publish.

I developed and packaged everything into a few small docker containers (2 python apps, 1 postgres db, and 1 db cleanup script in another container. I'll likely also add some reverse proxy like Nginx or Caddy) and run it locally using docker-compose, with all secrets in a .env file (although I could use docker secrets)

I thought about either using a managed Kubernetes service from a provider like DigitalOcean, or setting up a vServer from scratch with the help of some online guides and ChatGPT/Claude (as I don't have a lot of infrastructure experience).

What is your guys go-to-stack? Any recommendations that are relatively simple (or well-documented) to setup while still being cost-efficient and easy to scale? What are your experiences with services like dokku or dokploy?

Re scaling: I also considered using an external Postgres provider, allowing me to scale the "worker" services horizontally when needed.

Asked here because I'm sure it might be relevant for others, too. Thanks in advance!

Comments

austin-cheney•6mo ago

I wrote a Nodejs application to do this for me. It’s a personal project that serves as a dashboard for spawning web servers and docker compose instances. I am the only user of it so it’s probably not stable. The UI displays in a browser.

https://github.com/prettydiff/webserver

huksley•6mo ago

My experience:

- Dokku - too much shell scripting and you forget all the commands you typed after 1 year.

- Dokploy - you need to install it on your host. So it makes it difficult to switch to a bigger host.

So now I am actively developing a new platform which solves all this - DollarDeploy.

It makes it easy to deploy app from GitHub repo to the server of your choice, and automatically generate HTTPs cert, manage hosts, backups etc for $1/app/month.

Would be nice if you give it a try and provide feedback!

byrnedo•6mo ago

If you want, give skate a try ( https://github.com/skateco/skate ). I built it out of the frustration of having to learn the custom deploy syntax of all these other alternatives, instead it uses kubernetes manifests and is multi host.

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