Surprisingly, Dokku (and also Heroku) doesn’t offer you a straightforward option to deploy static websites. Sure, a lot of websites are anyway dynamic nowadays, but there is still plenty of need for static pages such as blogs created by the likes of Wintersmith.

The following steps will show you how to make it anyway happen with the help of a custom buildpack that I’ve been working on. What it does is to compile and deploy a lightweight NGINX instance that serves all the files.

All you have to do are the following three steps:

  1. Add a file called .env to the root of your website directory. The file should have the following content: export BUILDPACK_URL=

  2. Add second, empty file called .static to the same directory

  3. Push your project to Dokku: git push [your server] master

The static files that you want to host should be similarly in the root directory together with the .env and .static file. Don’t worry, those two files will not be served.

The first push will take a bit longer as the buildpack is downloading all the relevant source codes and compiling the packages, but every new push will reuse the already pre-compiled files making it a lot faster the second time round.

This buildpack has been successfully run on Digital Ocean instances of Ubuntu 14.04 and I assume that other configurations might work as well. Let me know if you successfully used the buildpack in different configurations.