Motivation

I shot myself in the foot by procrastinating writing this post years ago and having to figure it out all over again yesterday. Never again.

 

Here be the commands

  1. Install the postgres plugin if you haven’t
dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-postgres.git postgres
  1. Create the database
dokku postgres:create commento
  1. Set up the environment variables & domain
dokku apps:create commento
dokku config:set COMMENTO_ORIGIN=http://<your commento domain>
dokku config:set COMMENTO_POSTGRES=<your postgres url from step 2>
dokku domains:add commento http://<your commento domain>

Now set up an A record pointing your Commento subdomain to your server IP.

  1. Deploy commento
docker pull registry.gitlab.com/commento/commento
docker tag registry.gitlab.com/commento/commento dokku/commento
dokku tags:deploy commento
dokku proxy:ports-set commento http:80:8080 # if your proxy isn't set up properly
  1. Set up SSL
dokku letsencrypt commento
  1. After setting up a new account, forbid new owner signups (if it applies to you)
dokku config:set commento COMMENTO_FORBID_NEW_OWNERS=true
  1. If anything goes wrong, read the logs
dokku logs commento

 

Congrats on hosting your own privacy-respecting commenting server!