I'm interested in setting up my own server just to make it easy to run and play around with web projects. Does anyone know if there is a heroku like service that I can host on my own server to manage web apps/sites.<p>Think connecting to a git repo from the UI. connecting to a domain to create development urls: projectname.domain.com, that sort of things.<p>I'm not sure what to look/search for online to find what I'm looking for.
If you want to set up your own server, why do you need a control panel? Just learn to configure all the services. Command line is all you need.<p>If you want ease-of-use, running your own server is not the way to go. You can get pretty far with AWS/GCP/Azure free tier.
I can whole-heartedly recommend Dokku[0], it's been fantastic for me, and does exactly what you describe.<p>Edit: Doh! Except for the admin panel, which was a pretty major part of your question :) Dokku is CLI-based, though I seem to remember there being a third-party web ui for it, can't remember. Either way, it might still be worth checking out.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/dokku/dokku" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dokku/dokku</a>
If you really want something like Heroku, you could try Dokku, though that's not really a control panel. Digital Ocean provides a droplet image for it.
Another option I don't see mentioned so far:<p>We use VirtualMin on our servers for all of our commodity hosting (it is based upon WebMin). There is an open source version and a pro version. We use the pro version — I don't personally know what the exact differences are, as it was my colleague's choice historically, so I can't comment specifically on the open source version's features. But we've found it pretty good, and cheap enough ($6/month/server).<p>It takes literally seconds to set up a new domain, provides config info to copy across to our DNS provider (we don't do DNS on the same machine, other folk can provide a far more reliable service at no extra cost: FWIW, we use Joker), it has support for autocerts from Let's Encrypt, and has fairly up-to-date app bundles for a lot of well known web apps.<p>I'm a developer, and have no issues with command line, but using a control panel for day-to-day basics is just so easy, pretty much a total no-brainer, and also allows us to have more technically minded folk manage their own domains/subdomains and services (if you wish to share/resell).<p>I've used Plesk before, and didn't like it much, for a variety of reasons (including when it borked an update, and was all kinds of hell to fix)<p><a href="https://www.virtualmin.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.virtualmin.com</a>
I've been using captainduckduck in production for a while now.<p>It might be a little finniky for you to wrap your head around at first, but it does work well once you do that.<p><a href="https://captainduckduck.com" rel="nofollow">https://captainduckduck.com</a>
I’ve started using Ansible to document how I want my server set up in a machine readable way. Very useful because when I want to start over I can just run my Ansible playbooks to set up everything to how I want it. I’d prefer that to an GUI approach such as an admin panel. A GUI makes it difficult to record your desired configuration and then later initialise a new server (or a reinstalled OS) to use said configuration. Even simply writing a shell script to do the configuration would be great as it means you’re both (1) documenting your configuration preferences and (2) making a tool that sets everything up as per your preferences. YMMV of course.
I think this is the usecase Redhat is trying to target with its Cockpit application. Easy GUI admin for a server. I think it works with all Linux distros but more tuned for Refora, RHEL, CentOS.
I built ScaleDynamix[1] with similar goals in mind. It connects to your AWS/GCP/Azure account via terraform and gives you a cpanel like interface to launch sites. You can also horizontally scale the stack either manually or automatically based on utilization. It's optimized for php, but you can run any other languages easily on it.<p>There is a free version available for non-commercial projects.<p>[1] <a href="https://scaledynamix.com" rel="nofollow">https://scaledynamix.com</a>
I’m using Dokku + Kirby or Serverpilot + Kirby. Kirby has a plugin called autogit, where you can update/save changes to/from a git repository
If you want LAMP/LEMP, check out <a href="https://vestacp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://vestacp.com/</a>.<p>You can provision a subdomain and clone whatever repo into the root directory and be functional pretty quickly.
Take a look at this discussion: <a href="https://twitter.com/wesbos/status/1067833058731147265" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/wesbos/status/1067833058731147265</a>
For PHP projects, Laravel Forge is a good option <a href="https://forge.laravel.com/" rel="nofollow">https://forge.laravel.com/</a>
We have a Plesk server that we use to host random stuff easily. Takes care of DNS, Git, updates, etc etc. Great solution for something that just works.
After I started using Nixos I can't imagine using anything else. <a href="https://nixos.org" rel="nofollow">https://nixos.org</a>