Solution For Dokku App That Needs Restart
Hey,
I have been facing an issue with a Whatsapp bot I have running in Dokku (more on this in a next article!).
The node app got consistently stuck after every deploy. So I needed to restart the app manually after every deploy.
The app was actually starting, but the actual bot didn’t initialise correctly.
To restart the app I had to ssh into the Dokku server and run:
$ dokku ps:restart <app-name>
It has been months like that (in my defense I don’t do that many deploys there), until now!
A problem of concurrency.
I put myself to work on this and it suddenly struck me ⚡.
Dokku by default keeps for 60 seconds the old container running.
I was always wondering what all those messages really meant. So reading the documentation I could make sense of all those messages.
Apparently the process is like this:
- Dokku creates the new container, and waits 10 seconds until it is considered ready.
- Dokku marks the old container as to be removed in 60 seconds.
- Dokku continues with the release process and at the end makes new traffic go to the new container.
- The old container is eventually removed if the new container does not crash.
In my scenario, having two bots running (on the same shared session) at the same time was an issue. Issue found! 🎉
Easy Solution
Once identified the problem the easy solution was obvious: Disabling the zero downtime deploys feature.
How? Easy, with this command:
$ dokku checks:disable <app-name>
After this I haven’t faced the issue anymore! 🎉🎉🎉
⚠️ Depending on your situation this might not be an acceptable solution. In my case this is a bot for my personal use and having some seconds of downtime during release is something more than reasonable to me. Please, take into account that this will add downtime to your release process. Read the Zero Downtime Deploys documentation from Dokku and understand the consequences.
Did you find this interesting? Let me know with a big like below 👍.