I’ve read great things about Dokku, a project billing itself as:

An open source PAAS alternative to Heroku

I’m starting with this after reading a bit about nginx because it seems much easier to manage. I toyed with the idea of installing all my necessary dependencies locally and running a simple static site from Mojave but I think this approach will be a bit easier.

I followed the following instructions from their documentation.

Mojave

Download installation script

$ wget -NP . https://dokku.com/bootstrap.sh

Run the installer

$ sudo DOKKU_TAG=v0.35.18 bash bootstrap.sh

Configure your server domain

$ dokku domains:set-global bucareli.co

and your ssh key to the dokku user

$ PUBLIC_KEY="your-public-key-contents-here" $ echo "$PUBLIC_KEY" | dokku ssh-keys:add admin

create your first app and you’re off!

$ dokku apps:create test-app

To get the custom domain working, I went to Porkbun and created an A record pointing to my server’s public IP Address.

Local

In my local project directory I ran this command:

$ git remote add dokku dokku@your-vps-ip:test-app

Lastly I ran

$ git push dokku main

This prompted me to enter the password for dokku, which meant my SSH key wasn’t configured successfully.