piku

The tiniest Heroku/CloudFoundry-like PaaS you've ever seen, inspired by dokku.

Motivation

I kept finding myself wanting an Heroku/CloudFoundry-like way to deploy stuff on a few remote ARM boards and my Raspberry Pi cluster, but since dokku still doesn't work on ARM and even docker can be overkill sometimes, I decided to roll my own.

Project Status/ToDo:

From the bottom up:

• Support Node deployments (if at all possible in a sane fashion)
• chroot/namespace isolation
• Proxy deployments to other nodes (build on one box, deploy to many)
• Support Clojure/Java deployments
• CLI command documentation
• Complete installation instructions (see INSTALL.md for a working draft)
• Installation helper/SSH key add
• Support barebones binary deployments
• Sample Go app
• Support Go deployments
• Worker scaling
• Remote CLI commands for changing/viewing applied/live settings
• Remote tailing of all logfiles for a single application
• HTTP port selection (and per-app environment variables)
• Sample Python app
• Procfile support (wsgi and worker processes for now, web processes being tested)
• Basic CLI commands to manage apps
• virtualenv isolation
• Support Python deployments
• Repo creation upon first push
• Basic understanding of how dokku works

Workflow

• Set up an SSH git remote pointing to piku with the app name as repo name (git remote add paas piku@server:app1)
• git push paas master your code
• piku determines the runtime and installs the dependencies for your app (building whatever's required)
  • For Python, it segregates each app's dependencies into a virtualenv
  • For Go, it defines a separate GOPATH for each app
• It then looks at a Procfile and starts the relevant workers using uWSGI as a generic process manager

Later on, I intend to do fancier dokku-like stuff like reconfiguring nginx, but a twist I'm planning on doing is having one piku machine act as a build box and deploy the finished product to another.

Might take a while, though.

Target Platforms

As a baseline, I intend to make sure this runs on the original Rasbperry Pi Model B (which is where I'm testing it).

But since I have an ODROID-U2, a bunch of Pi 2s and a few more boards on the way, it will be tested on a number of places where running x64 binaries is unfeasible.

In general, it will likely work in any POSIX-like environment where you have Python and SSH (I'm very likely to test it under Cygwin at some point).

Target Runtimes

I intend to support Python, Go, Node and Clojure (Java), but will be focusing on Python first.

FAQ

Q: Why piku?

A: Partly because it's supposed to run on a Pi, because it's Japanese onomatopeia for 'twitch' or 'jolt', and because I know the name will annoy some of my friends.

Q: Why Python/why not Go?

A: I actually thought about doing this in Go right off the bat, but click is so cool and I needed to have uWSGI running anyway, so I caved in. But I'm very likely to take something like suture and port this across, doing away with uWSGI altogether.

Q: Does it run under Python 3?

A: It should. click goes a long way towards abstracting the simpler stuff, and I tried to avoid most obvious incompatibilities (other than a few differences in subprocess.call and the like). However, this targets Python 2.7 first, since that's the default on Raspbian. Pull requests are welcome.

Q: Why not just use dokku?

A: I use dokku daily, and for most of my personal stuff. But the dokku stack relies on a number of x64 containers that need to be completely rebuilt for ARM, and when I decided I needed something like this (March 2016) that was barely possible - docker itself is not fully baked for ARM yet, and people are still trying to get herokuish and buildstep to build on ARM.