Debian Package Installation Notes

As of 0.3.18, Dokku defaults to being installed via Debian package. While certain hosts may require extra work to get running, you may optionally wish to automate the installation of Dokku without the use of our bootstrap.sh Bash script. The following are the steps run by said script:

# install prerequisites
sudo apt-get update -qq >/dev/null
sudo apt-get -qq -y --no-install-recommends install apt-transport-https

# install docker
wget -nv -O - https://get.docker.com/ | sh

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

Unattended installation

In case you want to perform an unattended installation of Dokku, this is made possible through debconf, which allows you to configure a package before installing it.

You can set any of the below options through the debconf-set-selections command, for example to enable vhost-based deployments:

echo "dokku dokku/vhost_enable boolean true" | sudo debconf-set-selections

After setting the desired options, proceed with the installation as described above.

debconf options

Name	Type	Default	Description
dokku/vhost_enable	boolean	false	Use vhost-based deployments (e.g. [yourapp].dokku.me)
dokku/hostname	string	dokku.me	Hostname, used as vhost domain and for showing app URL after deploy
dokku/skip_key_file	boolean	false	Don't check for the existence of the dokku/key_file. Warning: Setting this to true, will require you to manually add an SSH key later on.
dokku/key_file	string	/root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub	Path on disk to an SSH key to add to the Dokku user (Will be ignored on dpkg-reconfigure)
dokku/nginx_enable	boolean	true	Enable nginx-vhosts plugin