Is Jenkins and Dokku more or less the same?

Question

I have seen Jenkins being used as CI for Docker containers. Is Dokku also a CI platform like Jenkins?

If, what is the difference when I want to do CI with Docker containers for a PHP application?

Answer 1

Are you maybe confusing drone with Dokku? Dokku is a platform for execution of heroku apps drone is a docker based CI. I don't know much about drone but since docker can't be run inside a docker container without some hacking you are better off sticking to a traditional CI like jenkins, bamboo, team city or such.

Answer 2

Continuing from Usman Ismail's answer...

If you look at dokku-alt, the distinction is less clear. In particular dokku-alt allows you to use a Dockerfile for the build rather than buildstep, so it's not specific to Heroku like apps.

Dokku-alt is not in itself a CI system, but out of the box it does verify that the build completes without error before it's deployed, and using git hooks you could connect in your test-suite to run on every git push and block deployment when it fails.

CI typically is a bit more than this. You'd normally have multiple deployments for test, staging and live, and to some extent it also encompasses a set of practices. Dokku-alt gives you some very useful parts of CI, and a fairly clear path to building more of it fairly easily, but it's not a complete CI system in itself.

You might well prefer to keep your main git repository elsewhere, and keep jenkins in the picture for automating transfer to dokku-alt.