piku

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

Motivation

I kept finding myself wanting an Heroku-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 Java deployments
• Support Go deployments
• chroot isolation
• Support barebones binary deployments
• Installation instructions
• 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 dependencies
• It then looks at a Procfile and starts the relevant workers

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 and Java, but will be focusing on Python first, moving from shared runtime to virtualenv (and later, if feasible, pyenv support).

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 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...)