How to Set Up Your Own PaaS Within Hours
How to Set Up Your Own PaaS Within Hours

Five simple steps to quickly set up your very own private PaaS environment using available free open-source technologies

Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash

There are many useful and free open-source software on the Internet, we just need to know where to look.

The PaaS setup that I’m going to recommend works well for private/on-premise setup as well. There’s no coding involved, just some CLI configurations.

Having your own PaaS is useful if you’re running a team of engineers requiring flexibility, privacy, and data ownership. I mainly use it for rapid prototyping purposes and hosting my own suite of web applications with minimal traffic.

I would not recommend this setup for production purposes with high load unless you really know what you’re doing.

I’ll keep the article short and list down the high-level steps as the instructions on the websites are very easy to follow. I’ve done a couple of setups with minimal issues and they are usually done within a few hours.

Assuming you’re starting from scratch with the intent to deploy in the cloud, here are the five simple steps:

Setup a cloud account and rent a VM (e.g. AWS/EC2) Register a domain from a provider (e.g. AWS Route53) Set up the PaaS by following simple steps (CapRover) Create and deploy open-source applications out of the box (Wordpress, Jenkins, GitLab, and many more) Configure backups just in case

Please note that I’m not paid in any way by any of the companies listed in this article. I’m recommending them soley based on positive experiences.

#1: Setup a cloud account and rent a VM

You’ll need a virtual machine to host the applications. There are a variety of cloud providers that you can choose from. Here are some of the popular ones with 1-year free-tier option(s)/credits:

You can click on any of the above links to set up a new free account.

After creating the account, provision a virtual machine—recommended server setup to be Ubuntu 18.04 with at least 1GB RAM.

#2: Register a domain name

Applications will be deployed under a sub-domain, e.g. appone.apps.domain.com, apptwo.apps.domain.com, etc. so it’s essential to have your own domain.

Here are some websites which I’ve used for my domains:

If you’re using a cloud provider, e.g. AWS/Azure, it may be more convenient to register your domain with them to have everything managed centrally.

#3: Set up the PaaS

This section forms the main bulk of the setup. Although there are a number of available open-source PaaS available, e.g. Dokku, CapRover, Flynn, etc. I’ll be using CapRover as an example.

I’ll further break down this portion into four steps:

The steps above should get your PaaS up and running.

#4: Create and deploy applications

Here comes the fun part. After logging into the CapRover dashboard, navigate to the Apps screen via “Apps” at the left sidebar.

Click on the “One-Click Apps/Databases” button.
['Jimmy Soh']
['Programming', 'Technology', 'Software Development', 'Startup', 'Software Engineering']