DigitalOcean Droplet Installation Notes

DigitalOcean offers a pre-installed Dokku image. You can run this image on any sized Droplet, although larger Droplets will allow you to run larger applications.

Info

Please disable IPv6. There are known issues with IPv6 on DigitalOcean and Docker. If you would like to run Dokku on an IPv6 DigitalOcean Droplet, please consult this guide.

1. Login to your DigitalOcean account.
2. Click Create a Droplet.
3. Under Choose an image > Marketplace, search latest Dokku release for Ubuntu 24.04 (version numbers may vary).
4. Under Choose a size, select your machine spec.
5. Under Choose a datacenter region, select your region.
6. Add an SSH Key.
7. New Keys
   1. Under Add your SSH keys click New SSH Key (this opens a dialog).
   2. From your terminal, execute cat $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
   3. Copy the output and paste it into the New SSH Key dialog, provide a name and click Add SSH Key.
8. Existing Keys
   1. Simply add a checkmark next to the existing keys you'd like to add.
9. Under Finalize and create, give your Droplet a hostname (not required) and click Create.
10. Once created, copy the IP address to your clipboard.
11. In a terminal, ssh onto the server by running ssh root@$SERVER_IP, where $SERVER_IP is your server's IP address.
12. Remove the default nginx site via rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

13. If you added more than one key, use the dokku ssh-keys:add to add an ssh key to the dokku user:

    echo "$CONTENTS_OF_YOUR_PUBLIC_SSH_KEY_HERE" | dokku ssh-keys:add KEY_NAME
    

14. Ensure your server has a correct global hostname via dokku domains:set-global

    # replace dokku.me with a hostname pointed at your server
    dokku domains:set-global dokku.me