How long did it take you to go from "making a new server / copying configs is fine" to "this is tedious enough I'd like to abstract it?"

Like, was it a years-long journey or is this the type of thing that becomes immediately obvious once you start working w/ N servers or something?

I'm trying to learn the space between "physical machines in my apartment" and "cloud-native everything" and that's led me to the point where I'm happily using cloud-init to configure servers and running fun little docker compose systems on them.

That's where I am too right now for personal projects, and I ended up reimplementing parts of Dokuploy for that, but I don't feel much of a need to move from "fun little docker compose" for some reason

For homelab (but not only) you can install Proxmox Virtual Environment on your physical machine. You end up with a way to create VMs and containers with a web UI. It supports cloud-init too. If you have a spare machine it's excellent for experimenting and learning.

https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...

https://proxmox-helper-scripts.vercel.app/

I wanted to self-host more of my Rails projects and Dokku comes with nice Buildpack support so I can just push a generic Rails app and it'll run out of the box. That plus that I had to set up a new server after many years made me look into that more.

cloud-init is good, but it assumes that you treat your VMs like containers and that means you will need a lot more VMs that you constantly create and destroy and you will have to deal with block storage for persistence.

If all you do is ssh into a system with docker compose installed, you will hardly benefit from cloud-init beyond the first boot.

What you are actually searching for is called ansible

That's pretty much the opposite of what I'm searching for. Getting a static site running with https on Dokku on a fresh server is done in under 2 minutes if you type quickly.

1) Run curl command to install Dokku

2) Set up domain to point to my server

3) Run 3 Dokku commands (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41358578)

4) Add remote git url to my repository

5) Git push to that remote

6) Done

1) Install Ansible

2) Create a playbook which pulls from your GIT, sets the DNS and installs Caddy (or apache+certbot or whatever) (~5min)

3) Run Ansible

You now don't need docker, can change to any other cheaper hoster any time you want and you don't have the limitations of "serverless" services

That reads like "draw a circle; draw the rest of the owl".

Look, I used Ansible for years. And chef. And puppet, so I've been around that particular block a bunch of times. There's no way you legitimately think that someone can, with no previous experience, create a playbook that does all you need in "~5min".

I ansible a good tool? Absolutely. Does it do what a tool like Dokku (or some of the others mentioned) do? Absolutely not. They aren't meant to compete, either.

That’s orthogonal; you can use Ansible with Dokku.

I downvoted because you didn't qualify your statement.