I kept finding myself wanting an Heroku/CloudFoundry-like way to deploy stuff on a few remote ARM boards and [my Raspberry Pi cluster][raspi-cluster], but since [dokku][dokku] didn't work on ARM at the time and even `docker` can be overkill sometimes, I decided to roll my own.
This is currently being used for production deployments of [my website](https://taoofmac.com) and a few other projects of mine that run on Azure and other IaaS providers. Regardless, there is still room for improvement:
Since I have an ODROID-U2, [a bunch of Pi 2s][raspi-cluster] and a few more ARM boards on the way, it is often tested on a number of places where running `x64` binaries is unfeasible.
But there are already a few folk using `piku` on vanilla `x64` Linux without any issues whatsoever, so yes, you can use it as a micro-PaaS for 'real' stuff. Your mileage may vary.
`piku` currently supports deploying apps (and dependencies) written in Python, with Go, Clojure (Java) and Node (see [above](#project-statustodo)) in the works. But if it can be invoked from a shell, it can be run inside `piku`.
**A:** Partly because it's supposed to run on a [Pi][pi], because it's Japanese onomatopeia for 'twitch' or 'jolt', and because I know the name will annoy some of my friends.
**A:** I actually thought about doing this in Go right off the bat, but [click][click] is so cool and I needed to have [uWSGI][uwsgi] running anyway, so I caved in. But I'm very likely to take something like [suture](https://github.com/thejerf/suture) and port this across, doing away with [uWSGI][uwsgi] altogether.
Go also (at the time) did not have a way to vendor dependencies that I was comfortable with, and that is also why Go support fell behind. Hopefully that will change soon.
**A:** Right now, it _only_ runs on Python 3, even though it can deploy apps written in both major versions. It began its development using 2.7 and using`click` for abstracting the simpler stuff, and I eventually switched over to 3.5 once it was supported in Debian Stretch and Raspbian since I wanted to make installing it on the Raspberry Pi as simple as possible.
**A:** I used `dokku` daily for most of my personal stuff for a good while. But it relied on a number of `x64` containers that needed to be completely rebuilt for ARM, and when I decided I needed something like this (March 2016) that was barely possible - `docker` itself was not fully baked for ARM yet, and people were at the time trying to get `herokuish` and `buildstep` to build on ARM.
