When building projects one of the annoying parts is setting up stuff like web servers, relational databases, caching, etc. It’s often expensive (Heroku charges $25/month for their 1GB instance, the same server is 5/month on DigitalOcean) or tedious to set up and manage. I no longer enjoy spending hours and days setting up a server, building tools, sending code to the server, building it, getting an SSL certificate, installing it, update nginx over and over again whenever I have a new project.
That’s where open-source PAASs came in. They often have an extremely easy-to-use app/database deployment & web server manager. Examples:
For example, with CapRover, you can host the below with one click:
- Databases and Database GUIs. Eg PostgreSQL, Redis, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.
- Email hosting, newsletter & mailing list solutions.
- Customer support, CMSs, ERPs, CRMs, LMSs & Invoicing solutions.
- Analytics
- Blogging and Content. Eg: Ghost, Jekyll, WordPress, etc.
- CI/CD
- Dev tools (monitoring, notifications, URL shorteners, backups, etc)
- Cloud storage, FTP & media servers
- Torrent clients
- Document servers (text documents, spreadsheets & presentations)
- And
more - Literally anything wrapped in a Docker container
Requirements:
- Own a domain.
- Have some familiarity with the Cloud, Linux and Docker.
Get server & install Docker
Set up an Ubuntu VPS
Good providers:
https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier/#compute (Free )https://www.oracle.com/ke/cloud/free/#always-free (Free if you canmanage to sign up lol)https://contabo.com/en/vps/ https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/vps.php#v-server-details https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/compare/ https://www.racknerd.com/kvm-vps https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
Create VPS Instance
I’ll be using the free virtual machine (
In GCP
Create an Ubuntu instance from the
Configure Firewall
Add firewall rules to allow network traffic from the following:
- 80 TCP for regular HTTP connections
- 443 TCP for secure HTTPS connections
- 3000 TCP for initial Installation (can be blocked once attached to a domain)
- 7946 TCP/UDP for Container Network Discovery
- 4789 TCP/UDP for Container Overlay Network
- 2377 TCP/UDP for Docker swarm API
- 996 TCP for secure HTTPS connections specific to Docker Registry
In case of an ubuntu server, run
ufw allow 80,443,3000,996,7946,4789,2377/tcp; ufw allow 7946,4789,2377/udp;
Your VPS provider may have a different way to configure the firewall.
In GCP
In the case of GCP, we can create firewall rules from the
Note that I’ve created a network tag caprover that we’ll use next.
From the caprover network tag.
Install Docker
SSH into the VM and install Docker.
This can be done using the get
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sudo sh get-docker.sh
Sample output:
Set up CapRover
Install CapRover on the server
Run the following to install CapRover:
sudo docker run -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -p 3000:3000 -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /captain:/captain caprover/caprover
NOTE: do not change the port mappings. CapRover only works on the specified ports.
You will see a bunch of outputs on your screen. Once the CapRover is initialised, you can visit http://[IP_OF_YOUR_SERVER]:3000 in your browser and log in to CapRover using the default password captain42. You can change your password later. However, do not make any changes in the dashboard. We'll use the command-line tool to set up the server.
Set up DNS
Let's say you own mydomain.com. Set *.something.mydomain.com as an A-record in your DNS settings to point to the IP address of the server where you installed CapRover.
Find more info
Install CapRover CLI on your local machine
npm install -g caprover
Complete CapRover Setup & log in to the Dashboard
Complete CapRover Setup
Run the following on your local machine:
caprover serversetup
Follow the steps and log in to your CapRover instance. When prompted to enter the root domain, enter something.mydomain.com assuming that you set *.something.mydomain.com to point to your IP address in step #Set up DNS. Now you can access your CapRover from captain.something.mydomain.com and log in.
Log in to the Dashboard
Visit the CapRover dashboard at http://captain.something.mydomain.com and log in using the password you set up in the above step.