lostdock

lostdock is a simple command line tool that allows managing a server running multiple docker compose stacks. Cheap (money and time) deployment solution for the underserved small startup.

• Replace expensive PaaS/SaaS tools with pre-configured open source stacks for log and metric aggregation, reverse proxy, container management, and more.

Installation

# In your local environment
npm install -g lostdock

Getting started

Prerequisites:

• A VPS with your SSH key allowed to login as root. We recommend creating a new VPS first with a cheap provider that gives you a static IPv4 address.

Install CLI in your local environment:

npm install -g lostdock

Configure lostdock with your SSH connection details:

lostdock login

Install Docker, Docker compose, some dependencies and start the firewall.

lostdock server init

Run the traefik reverse proxy. You need a wildcard A record *.example.com pointing to your server IPv4 address.

export TRAEFIK_HOST=traefik.example.com

# Basic auth: admin:admin
# Generated with `echo $(htpasswd -nb admin admin) | sed -e s/\\$/\\$\\$/g`
# Double dollar signs are required in Docker Compose
export TRAEFIK_BASIC_AUTH='admin:$$apr1$$QWfIwdTB$$tTTke28GgXk790t3agoKm.'

export LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL=example@example.com

lostdock stacks install-from-git \
    --url https://github.com/carlosbaraza/lostdock.git \
    --path ./packages/lostdock-traefik

After these, you should be able to access your Traefik Dashboard at traefik.example.com. (user: admin, password: admin)

You can deploy many other pre-configured stacks using the same commands. We recommend you install the following stacks too: lostdock-monitoring (log and metric aggregation and visualization stack) and lostdock-portainer (container management)

Deploying your first stack

Create a new folder for your stack and cd into it:

mkdir whoami-stack
cd whoami-stack

Create a docker-compose.yml with a simple traefik/whoami service responding to the domain whoami.example.com. TLS certificates would be generated automatically for it using Let's Encrypt.

version: "3.7"
services:
  whoami:
    image: "traefik/whoami"
    container_name: "whoami"
    labels:
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.whoami.rule=Host(`whoami.example.com`)"
      - "traefik.http.routers.whoami.service=whoami"
      - "traefik.http.routers.whoami.entrypoints=websecure"
      - "traefik.http.routers.whoami.tls=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.whoami.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"
      - "traefik.http.services.whoami.loadbalancer.server.port=9000"

Optionally, you can include the following:

• A .env file with the environment variables to use in your docker-compose.yml file.
• A ./install-local.sh file executed before installing to validate configuration
• A ./install-server.sh file executed in the server before running docker compose up for the first time. This is a good opportunity to create some volumes, external docker networks, file structures, permissions, etc.

When you are ready, run lostdock stacks install, and lostdock will do the following:

• Run ./install-local.sh (validate configuration)
• Push stack configuration files to server
• Run ./install-server.sh (preparation before starting stack. E.g. change permissions, create volumes, networks, etc)
• Run docker compose up.

Finally, clarify that you can easily stop using lostdock. You can always SSH into your server and keep using docker compose bare bones.

Features

lostdock gives you a nice set of tools to make deploying docker compose stacks to a VPS easier. Some of the features are:

• lostdock server init: Install Docker and Docker Compose on a fresh VPS server
• lostdock stacks install: Deploy a stack to a server
• lostdock stacks install-from-git: Deploy stack from a GitHub repository including a docker-compose.yml. Useful to share pre-configured stacks.
• lostdock stacks: Manage stack configuration, environment variables, start, stop, restart, etc.
• Multiple extremely useful stacks:
  • lostdock-traefik: Reverse proxy with auto generated TLS certificates
  • lostdock-monitoring: Log and metric aggregation and visualization stack. Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, cAdvisor, Node Exporter, alertmanager, and more.
  • lostdock-portainer: Container management. Web UI to manage your Docker environments, stacks & containers with ease.

Refer to the full documentation at lostdock.com for an exhaustive list of features.

FAQs

How could I stop using lostdock?

lostdock is a thin wrapper around docker compose with some handy tools to init a server, set env variables, install pre-configured stacks, etc. However, the core is just docker compose and a few bash scripts in your stack folder, so it is very easy to stop using if ever needed. Just SSH into your server and run docker compose in the ~/stacks/your-stack folder.

Why old school VPS and docker compose?

The key insight is that Virtual Private Servers are cheap, but your time is not. If only we could easily setup/maintain a server and deploy many apps in it.

Some unordered thoughts that brought me to this solution:

• A cheap $5/month server can handle an incredible amount of load. If needed it could scale vertically, although most projects would never see that much traffic.
• A lot have changed since VPS run out of popularity.
  • We exhausted ourselves with messy admin heavy deployments (manual dependency management, conflicting dependencies, manual migrations, manual DB admin, manual process management, etc).
  • Docker changed it for good, with nice packages that contain all that is needed to run your application without conflicts. Now your problem is orchestrating Docker containers (solved by docker compose among many others).
• Distributing pre-configured stacks becomes trivial if you set a flexible enough standard (e.g. Kubernetes Helm). We can replace many expensive SaaS tools like Datadog. For example lostdock-monitoring (log and metric aggregation and visualization stack), lostdock-traefik (reverse proxy) and lostdock-portainer (container management).
• PaaS like Vercel, Fly, Heroku are useful, but not a general target for any kind of application. Hooking multiple microservices, databases, etc is hard and bug prone (compared to a simple docker-compose.yml).
• Kubernetes and other orchestration software are complex, and the benefits are only apparent in big organizations with large teams and projects. Small startups are underserved.
• Docker is the de-facto standard for containers nowadays.
  • The tooling is really mature and stable after some buggy beginnings that created myths about how reliable containers are.
  • It is quite simple to package any type of application into a docker image. You can even run databases.

License

MIT