My notes about setting up Dokploy, an open source alternative to Heroku, Vercel, and Netlify, on a Linux VPS.

Before installing Dokploy on a VPS, I like to set up Tailscale first. This is because after installation, Dokploy will ask me to set up an admin user via http://<public-ip>:3000, and I prefer not to do that over an unencrypted connection.

# This will install Docker along with Dokploy
curl -sSL https://dokploy.com/install.sh -o install-dokploy.sh
sudo sh install-dokploy.sh

After installing I do this:

1. Set custom domain. Assuming there is a domain already pointing to the VPS, I go to Settings → Web Server → Domains and set up the server domain + Let's Encrypt
2. Set up S3 Destination. This allows Dokploy to upload database and volume backups to an S3-compatible storage. Add that in Settings → S3 Destinations.