Create your own heroku review apps with dokku

In short, you can deploy your git brunches as standalone apps with unique urls. This is very useful feature.

And as I don't use Heroku, I'll show you how to create your own Heroku review apps on dokku.

Preinstall steps

You need to create public - id_dokku_rsa.pub and private - id_dokku_rsa keys for deployment, generate them with ssh-keygen -t rsa command.

You need to have some domain i.e. mysite.com and access to dns CNAME-records.

Add two records

dokku.mysite.com     300     IN      CNAME   YOUR_UBUNTU_SERVER_IP
*.dokku.mysite.com    300     IN      CNAME   YOUR_UBUNTU_SERVER_IP

(you always can use your /etc/hosts file if you have no access to cname-records)

And you need a clean ubuntu 14.04 server.

Install steps

Install dokku

ssh into your ubuntu server and run there

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dokku/dokku/v0.4.14/bootstrap.sh
sudo DOKKU_TAG=v0.4.14 bash bootstrap.sh

then goto in browser to YOUR_UBUNTU_SERVER_IP and enter in the web interface VHOST=mysite.com and public id_dokku_rsa.pub key generated at Preinstall steps.

Fix installation errors

With some probability you can get one dokku installation problem, to check it, you need to look into /home/dokku/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

Just run cat /home/dokku/.ssh/authorized_keys and if you will see there garbage like this

command="echo 'Please login as the user \"ubuntu\" rather than the user \"root\".';echo;sleep 10"

in /home/dokku/.ssh/authorized_keys just remove that garbage.

Resulted authorized_keys must be looking like this

command="FINGERPRINT=42:ed:bd:8a:1e:aa:60:4f:8b:62:a1:5e:da:b6:53:b0 NAME=admin `cat /home/dokku/.sshcommand` $SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND",no-agent-forwarding,no-user-rc,no-X11-forwarding,no-port-forwarding YOUR_KEY

where YOUR_KEY is your id_dokku_rsa.pub key content.

Hack dokku

Then you need to hack dokku a little.

The problem is that stable dokku version contains one error, which prevents you to deploy any other branches than master.

I fixed this error in this PR but it is not in stable dokku version.

You need to find in /var/lib/dokku/plugins/enabled/git/commands file following line

if test -f "$PLUGIN_PATH"/enabled/*/receive-branch; then

and replace this line with

if [[ $(find "$PLUGIN_PATH"/enabled/*/receive-branch 2>/dev/null | wc -l) != 0 ]]; then

Install dokku plugin which allows you to deploy non master brunches

To support multiple brunches in dokku,

I wrote a simple dokku plugin dokku-receive-branch (don't forget to star it ;-))

To install plugin run

sudo dokku plugin:install https://github.com/cinarra/dokku-receive-branch.git

And as plugin is in alpha quality stage, don't forget to update it periodically.

sudo dokku plugin:update receive-branch

Setup nginx

To prevent nginx respond on unkown hosts run command below

printf "server {\n  return 404;\n}\n" | sudo tee __default__.conf > /dev/null
sudo service nginx reload

This command adds

server {
  return 404;
}

to nginx config, so any requests to unknow hosts or via IP will be rejected with 404 error.

Create dokku app

dokku apps:create dokku

Prepare your project for deployment

You need to create Dockerfile file in the root of your project, for node apps it's content is

Dockerfile

Project install and run file run.sh,

run.sh

As pnpm sometimes crashes on install, I use a simple pnpm retry hack

pnpm is 20x faster than npm install so I recommend it to you

And you need to add a CHECKS file,

CHECKS

More information about CHECKS file you can read in dokku documentation

In current project I just check that runned container will respond with some html which contains kotatsu string.

/  kotatsu

Also add following two scripts in package json section, or create a bash aliases.

deploy

"deploy": "git push dokku $(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)"

destroy

"destroy": "git push dokku $(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)"

Installation complete.

User install

ssh setup

Now all your team members should add private id_dokku_rsa key to their computers.

Get id_dokku_rsa key generated at Preinstall steps and place it inside your ~/.ssh folder.

Add to ~/.ssh/config (if not exists create it) next lines

Host dokku.mysite.com
  User dokku
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dokku_rsa

git setup

Add additional remote endpoint to git

git remote add dokku dokku@dokku.mysite.com:dokku

User install complete

Now you can easily deploy any branch of you project on the server

Deploy

Always create initial deploy on master, because of internal realization details

You can deploy any branch you want, just run

npm run deploy
# this is a shortcut to
# git push dokku ${CURRENT_GIT_BRANCH_NAME}
# where CURRENT_GIT_BRANCH_NAME=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`

To deploy squashed commits run

npm run deploy -- --force

Master brunch will be available at http://dokku.mysite.com and all other brunches will be available at ${CURRENT_GIT_BRANCH_NAME}.dokku.mysite.com

After you have merged your branch, branch app is not needed, so inside your brunch run to free system resources.

npm run destroy
# this is a shortcut to
# git push dokku --delete ${CURRENT_GIT_BRANCH_NAME}
# where CURRENT_GIT_BRANCH_NAME=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`

This operation is not permitted on master branch, if you are really sure that you want to destroy master do this manually at server

dokku apps:destroy dokku force

istarkov/create-your-own-heroku-review-apps-with-dokku