Dokku

Dokku calls itself "the smallest PaaS implementation you've ever seen," and it earns that description. The entire thing runs as a collection of shell scripts and a thin Go binary on a single Linux server. It implements the Heroku Buildpack API, which means any codebase that Heroku can detect and build — Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Java, static sites — deploys to Dokku with the same `git push` command.

Installation takes under ten minutes on a fresh Ubuntu or Debian box. From there you create an app, push your code, and Dokku builds it inside a Docker container using the appropriate buildpack, maps it to a subdomain, and keeps it running. A small plugin ecosystem handles the most common additions: `dokku-postgres` provisions a Postgres container and injects the connection string automatically; `dokku-letsencrypt` provisions and renews TLS certificates; `dokku-redis` and `dokku-mongo` follow the same pattern.

There is no web UI. Every operation happens through the `dokku` CLI on the server or over SSH from your local machine. That constraint is a feature for the audience Dokku is aimed at — developers who are comfortable in a terminal and find dashboards an unnecessary abstraction on top of a tool that already does exactly one job well. The MIT license, a decade of continuous development, and zero external dependencies make it a reliable long-term choice for running a personal or small-team server without ongoing hosting costs growing with the team.