Deploy Gitea to Dokku

Requirements

• A server with Dokku installed and configured.
• The Dokku Postgres plugin.
• The Dokku letsencrypt plugin.

Steps

Create an application.

dokku apps:create gitea

Expose the ports for http and ssh. By default, gitea exposes 3000 for http and 22 for ssh. We want our application to listen externally on port 80, but we need to map our ssh to a different port because 22 is used by the host.

We will rely on the docker-options plugin to expose ssh properly.

# expose container `http` port 3000 on host `http` port 80
dokku proxy:ports-add gitea http:80:3000

# expose the container port 22 on host port 2222
dokku docker-options:add git deploy -p 2221:22

Add a rule in your firewall to allow connections on 2221.

sudo ufw allow 2221/tcp

Create a storage directory for the Gitea files.

sudo mkdir /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/gitea_data
sudo chown user:user /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/gitea_data
dokku storage:mount gitea /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/gitea_data:/data

Pull and deploy the Docker image from dockerhub.

docker pull gitea/gitea:latest
docker tag gitea/gitea:latest dokku/gitea:latest
dokku git:from-image gitea dokku/gitea:latest

Add a Let’s encrypt TLS certificate with the Dokku letsencrypt plugin.

dokku letsencrypt:set git email <your-email>
dokku letsencrypt:enable git

Now, go visit gitea.<yourdomain>, e.g., gitea.yourdomain.com.

Configuration

Most of the options are autopopulated, use the following settings as needed.

• Get the database information from dokku postgres:info gitea.
• Set the SSH port as 2221. Gitea will use this to format your projects’ SSH connection info in the UI.

Resources

• Inspiration
• gitea-in-dokku
• Deploying Gogs to Dokku
• gogs-in-dokku
• Initializing an app repository from a docker image (Dokku docs)

No artificial intelligence was used in the making of this post.