How to Use Dokku With AWS

This article goes in depth on how to incorporate dokku into an AWS EC2 Ubuntu instance.

Overview

So most of the dokku tutorials that I've seen all use DigitalOcean and rarely use any other cloud platform. Because of this, I thought that I should detail the steps that I took to set up dokku on an AWS EC2 instance. If you're in the same situation or that sounds interesting to you, then keep on reading.

Step 1 - Creating an EC2 Instance

Navigate to AWS and create yourself a free Ubuntu instance, I used version 20.04 LTS. The instructions that I took to do this are somewhere along the lines of this:

click the "Launch instance" button
type Ubuntu in the search bar
Select 20.04 LTS
Select t2.micro
Click Review and Launch
Edit Security groups
Click add rule
- In the Type column, select HTTP (allow inbound traffic on port 80), and it should autofill to allow all IPs
Click add rule
- In the Type column, select HTTPS (allow inbound traffic on port 443), and it should autofill to allow all IPs
Click Launch
Either create a new SSH key pair and download it or if you have an existin gpair downloaded that you want to use then you can use that pair

There might be a step or two that I missed in there, but if you follow those general guidlines then you should have a new EC2 instance up and running.

Step 2 - Connecting to Your EC2 Instance

Navigate back to your instances and then click on the hyperlinked instance id. Information about the instance's IP address and other information should pop up. Click on connect and then click on the SSH tab. Following the instructions that are listed there. If you're on Windows, you can use PuTTY or Powershell to SSH into your EC2 instance.

Step 3 - Installing Dokku

The first thing you should do is run sudo apt-get update to update any packages that have updates available. After that is done, if you are using Ubuntu or Debian you can follow the steps listed below, otherwise you should follow the steps for installing that are listed here https://dokku.com/.

 wget -nv -O - https://get.docker.com/ | sh
 wget -nv -O - https://packagecloud.io/dokku/dokku/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -
 export SOURCE="https://packagecloud.io/dokku/dokku/ubuntu/"
 export OS_ID="$(lsb_release -cs 2>/dev/null || echo "bionic")"
 echo "bionic focal" | grep -q "$OS_ID" || OS_ID="bionic"
 echo "deb $SOURCE $OS_ID main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dokku.list
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install dokku
 sudo dokku plugin:install-dependencies --core

enable nginx-vhosts plugin - yes
Hostname or IP for server - use a domain if you have one, otherwise you can leave it and we'll change it later
enable vhost-based deployments - I put yes, but if you don't want subdomains and prefer to have different dokku instance listed on different ports choose no. Here's the docs on it
keyfile for initial user - I'm not changing anything so going with Ok (both times)

With these steps done, dokku should now be installed on your EC2 instance.

Step 4 - Create a Dokku App

In your EC2 instance run the command dokku apps:create appname to create an app.

The steps after this point can happen in any order

Step 5 - Create or Add an SSH Key for Your Dokku Instance

Use ssh-keygen or PuTTY to create an SSH key on your local machine. This ssh key is created so that you can push to the dokku instance. Once you've created an SSH key, you need to get the public key onto the dokku instance. You can do this with this command cat /path/to/ssh-key-for-dokku | ssh -i "/Path/To/EC2/ssh-key" serverIP-Or-URL sudo dokku ssh-keys:add keyname For a more "real life" example, here is the command that I used on a previous EC2 instance. cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh -i "C:\Users\Jeremy\Downloads\test.pem" [email protected] sudo dokku ssh-keys:add jeremy

Step 6 - Push Your code

Head to the repository that you want to push to your server and run the command git remote add dokku dokku@serverIP:dokkuAppName Then run the typical git commands

git add .
git commit -m "some message"
git push dokku master

If everything is configured correctly, you should see that your code is getting pushed to your server in a fashion that is very similar to Heroku. At the end of the displayed outcome you will see the url for where your ap is deployed. Now at this point, if you don't have a domain and went with the default configuration while setting up dokku, you wont be able to get to your app. There are two ways you can fix this. You can either use your IP address for the domain or you can get domain. If you choose to only use your IP, you're going to be hardpressed when it comes down to enbaling https (or at least I was). So let's get a free domain.

Step 7 - Free domain

Go to freenom.com and type in a domain name. Once you've found a free one that you like, enter in the full domain (ie somefreedomain.ml) into the searchbar and you should see that it becomes available. Go through the process of acquiring the domain (watch the video above if you need more help) and sign into your account. Once inside your account, head to the part where you can change nameservers. Next, create a Cloudflare account and add the domain that you just created. Add an A record that points to your server's IP address. Then change the nameservers in freenom. Once this is done, configure cloudflare such that it is proxying and only allows for https.

Step 8 - Changing the dokku domains

Go back to your EC2 terminal and run dokku domains:set-global yourdomainname and dokku domains:set appname yourdomainname. This should allow you to now see your app, but if you can't see your app try to restart it by running dokku ps:rebuild appname.

Step 9 - Environment variables

If your app still isn't working then make sure that you have environment variables set. You can do this with the command of dokku config:set appname KEY=value but I would recommend you add in the --no-restart tag because not adding it cause me some headaches because my server would get stuck compiling typescript and I would have to stop it and then start it again. The bad thing is that when you stop and start your server, the IP address changes, which is problematic because I then had to change the remote git address and go modify my ssh connection## Overview