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: , , etc. CapRover Dokku 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 wrapped in a Docker container Literally anything Requirements: Own a domain. Have some familiarity with the Cloud, Linux and Docker. Get server & install Docker Set up an Ubuntu VPS Good providers: (Free ) https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier/#compute (Free if you can to sign up lol) https://www.oracle.com/ke/cloud/free/#always-free manage 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 ( ) from Google Cloud Platform. Feel free to use any other. Compute Engine 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 that we’ll use next. caprover From the , edit the virtual machine we created, adding the network tag. Compute Engine dashboard caprover 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 in your browser and log in to CapRover using the default password . 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. http://[IP_OF_YOUR_SERVER]:3000 captain42 Set up DNS Let's say you own . Set as an in your DNS settings to point to the IP address of the server where you installed CapRover. mydomain.com *.something.mydomain.com A-record 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 assuming that you set to point to your IP address in step #Set up DNS. Now you can access your CapRover from and log in. something.mydomain.com *.something.mydomain.com captain.something.mydomain.com Log in to the Dashboard Visit the CapRover dashboard at and log in using the password you set up in the above step. http://captain.something.mydomain.com Install the One-Click Apps from the Dashboard Sources and More Information https://caprover.com/docs/get-started.html#step-1-caprover-installation https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs
