Deployment Tasks

New as of 0.5.0

Sometimes you need to run a command on at deployment time, but before an app is completely deployed. Common use cases include:

• Checking a database is initialised
• Running database migrations
• Any commands required to set up the server (e.g. something like a Django collectstatic)

app.json and scripts.dokku

Dokku accomplishes this by using an app.json file. We (mostly) use the same format as Heroku's app.json. However, dokku currently only supports the nodes scripts.dokku.predeploy and scripts.dokku.postdeploy. Simply place an app.json file in the root of your repository or for dockerfile apps, ADD it to /app.

NOTE: postdeploy changes are NOT committed to the app image.

Example app.json

{
  "name": "barebones nodejs",
  "description": "A barebones Node.js app using Express 4.",
  "keywords": [
    "nodejs",
    "express"
  ],
  "repository": "https://github.com/michaelshobbs/node-js-sample",
  "scripts": {
    "dokku": {
      "predeploy": "touch /app/predeploy.test",
      "postdeploy": "curl https://some.external.api.service.com/deployment?state=success"
    }
  },
  "env": {
    "SECRET_TOKEN": {
      "description": "A secret key for verifying the integrity of signed cookies.",
      "value": "secret"
    },
    "WEB_CONCURRENCY": {
      "description": "The number of processes to run.",
      "generator": "echo 5"
    }
  },
  "image": "gliderlabs/herokuish",
  "addons": [
    "dokku-postgres",
    "dokku-redis"
  ],
  "buildpacks": [
    {
      "url": "https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs"
    }
  ]
}