How to Self-Host Apps and Databases With Dokploy

Paying Vercel or Heroku every month for something your own server could handle? Dokploy does that job for free, and you run it yourself.

It is an open-source PaaS with 38,105 stars on GitHub, written in TypeScript, and it covers app and database deploys, one-click templates, automatic backups and real-time monitoring. The catch is the good part: it all runs on your VPS, so the machine stays yours.

What You Need

• A VPS of your own to run it on.

Tutorial

1. Open https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy. This is the whole project, and it is where everything about Dokploy starts.
2. Click Star in the top right of the page. The repo sits at 38,105 stars, and starring it saves it to your own GitHub account so you can find it again.
3. Deploy Dokploy on your VPS. The point of the tool is that your apps and databases live on hardware you own, not on a managed host's servers.
4. Pick a one-click template for the app or database you want to run. Templates cover both, so you can start with either without wiring a service up by hand.
5. Turn on automatic backups. Once they are on, your data gets backed up for you instead of waiting on you to remember.
6. Watch the real-time monitoring. It updates live while a deploy goes through, so you can see what the box is doing instead of guessing.

Wrapping Up

You now have the same deploy-and-database workflow as Vercel, Netlify or Heroku, minus the monthly bill and minus someone else holding your server. Turn on the backups before you put anything real on it. Then move one small project over and see how it feels.