Shiori and Miniflux on Dokku as Self-hosting RSS Reading Solution

My first New Year’s cyber resolution for 2024 is to migrate more services and data to self-hosting solutions.

I already have a server with dokku for all my side projects, code-name hatchbox. I migrated projects from heroku to dokku years ago and I’ve been very happy with it.

Shiori is a simple bookmarks manager; Miniflux is a minimalist RSS reader. Both simple and well-maintained.

Sample shiori site

Sample miniflux site

After hosting both, I can configure miniflux calling shiori API to enabling marking of articles in one click.

Miniflux with shiori integration

translate docker-compose config to dokku commands

One thing I’m not entirely satisfied with is that dokku still doesn’t support docker-compose natively.

Docker-compose offers a declarative approach. Here’s a sample configuration for Miniflux.

I’ve annotated it with approximate equivalent dokku commands.

services:
  miniflux:
    image: ${MINIFLUX_IMAGE:-miniflux/miniflux:latest} # dokku git:from-image
    container_name: miniflux # dokku app:create miniflux
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "80:8080" # dokku domains:add
    environment:
      - DATABASE_URL=postgres://miniflux:secret@db/miniflux?sslmode=disable # dokku postgres:link
      - ADMIN_USERNAME=admin # dokku config:set for general env vars
      - ...
  db:
    image: postgres:15 # dokku plugin:install postgres
    container_name: postgres # dokku postgres:create
    environment:
      ...
    volumes:
      - miniflux-db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
volumes:
  miniflux-db:

On the other hand, dokku relies on imperitive commands to deploy apps, the above docker-compose config can be roughly translated into commands:

# create and config app
dokku apps:create miniflux
dokku config:set --no-restart miniflux ADMIN_USERNAME="admin"
dokku git:from-image miniflux miniflux/miniflux:latest # `git:from-image` sets app source to docker image instead of git repo

# create and link db
dokku postgres:create miniflux
dokku postgres:link miniflux miniflux # this automatically sets DATABASE_URL env var

# port mapping
dokku ports:add miniflux http:80:8080

# (optional) domain and cert
dokku domains:add miniflux miniflux.some.domain
dokku letsencrypt:enable miniflux

As long as the services in your docker-compose are popular enough to be covered by dokku plugins, you should be able to translate the configuration.

There’s already a tool dokkupose to streamline this process. Although it has been unmaintained for 2 years - so some dokku commands are already deprecated - it still provides a very good starting point for you to tweak.

commands translated by dokkupose, almost ready to use.

I feel like an LLM could do this translation better than me, so I’ll end with a reminder:

• test docker-compose to dokku translation with LLM.