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Set Up Your Own Heroku-like Cloud (PAAS) in 10 Minutes: A Quick Start Guide

by Paul OnteriApril 6th, 2022

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When building new projects, it’s usually annoying to repeatedly set up stuff like web servers, databases, etc. It’s often expensive or tedious to set up and manage. That’s where open-source PAASs came in. They are free and often have an easy to use app/database deployment & web server manager.'

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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: CapRover, Dokku, etc.

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 can manage 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 (Compute Engine) from Google Cloud Platform. Feel free to use any other.

In GCP

Create an Ubuntu instance from the GCP Dashboard.

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 Networking Dashboard:

Note that I’ve created a network tag caprover that we’ll use next.

From the Compute Engine dashboard, edit the virtual machine we created, adding the caprover network tag.

Install Docker

SSH into the VM and install Docker.

This can be done using the get convenience script:

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 here.

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.