RCrcarmo·May 20, 2026Submission
Piku/piku: The tiniest PaaS you've ever seen
4 points · Open discussionpiku
piku
Python2019–2026
piku / piku
piku
The tiniest PaaS you've ever seen. Piku allows you to do git push deployments to your own servers.
10Distinct people
30Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.6KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The tiniest PaaS you've ever seen. Piku allows you to do git push deployments to your own servers.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year30 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-11-28 13:52:12 UTC to 2026-05-20 19:19:54 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
30 sourcesThere is also piku, sort of a tiny dokku; https://github.com/piku/piku
In Coolify: Open-source and self-hostable Heroku / Netlify / Vercel alternativeCaddy branch · piku/piku · Discussion #382
2 points · Open discussionIt's actually worth taking your joke seriously to compare and contrast:
- piku deploys via git rather than scp/sftp, but authenticates via ssh like those tools
- piku supports a number of runtimes, including Python, Ruby, Node, Go, Clojure. The runtimes are implemented rather simply, you can add your own rather easily, see examples here in the code: https://github.com/piku/piku/blob/8777cc093a062c67d3bead9a5d...
- For each runtime, a mechanism is utilized to install and isolate package dependencies (requirements.txt in Python, Gemfile in Ruby, packages.json in Node, etc.)
- a Procfile and ENV file are used to declare your application entrypoints and envvars akin to Heroku / 12 Factor App ideas
- a CLI (ssh shim on dev client machine) is provided for checking status and logs from the client (as well as stop/start/restart)
- since all appli
Read the rest
cations are managed via uwsgi on the remote, there is also support for worker/sidecar processes and cronjob-style scheduled tasks
- HTTPS via Let's Encrypt (acme.sh) is handled automagically for web apps
I describe more about how piku works in this tutorial:
https://github.com/piku/webapp-tutorial?tab=readme-ov-file#b...
You're right that PHP apps have a simple deployment story, and in a way piku brings something akin to this level of simplicity to other web programming runtimes.
Piku: Allows git push deployments to your own servers
693 points · Open discussionhttp://github.com/piku/piku was by far my best example of such a thing. I was fed up with how hard it was to deploy and iterate applications quickly, and the first version was done in a weekend.
In short, it's a minimal Heroku clone that started out as ~500 lines of Python run by a custom SSH config.
It has paid for itself several times over, and is still something I use daily (it runs all my little API endpoints, Node-RED instances, Python services, you name it.
In Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?I like it. I wrote Piku (https://github.com/piku/piku) with much the same interest in fixing some of my pains, so I get where you're coming from with this. Will drop it into one of my current projects to build ESP32 binaries :)
In Show HN: Hancho – A simple and pleasant build system in ~500 lines of PythonI never had any serious issue with SD cards since the Pi 2B (and I've kept Pis running for years).
Anyway, for those wanting to deploy more generic apps, that is why I initially wrote https://github.com/piku/piku - you still have to flash the OS (and rpi-imager does that with sane defaults these days), but once you're done you have Heroku-like deployments for any language runtime you install on the Pi.
I also have https://github.com/rcarmo/ground-init, a cloud-init like shim that simplifies setting up machines (I'm a big fan of cloud-init, but since Raspbian doesn't support it and Ubuntu on ARM requires some fiddling to make it work I decided it wasn't too hard to roll my own).
(I probably should look into glueing that into rpi-imager, but there is are only so many hours in the day...)
In Gokrazy is coolI automated that away a long time ago: https://github.com/piku/piku/blob/master/piku.py#L814
In Show HN: Local development with .local domains and HTTPShttps://github.com/piku/piku - dozens of projects in various languages in the same tiny VPS.
In Ask HN: How do you deploy your side-projects?https://github.com/piku/piku
Started as a hack, turned into the standard way of how I deploy all my personal projects, and then some.
In Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?https://github.com/piku/piku if you’re self-hosting.
In Removal of Heroku free product plansThose of you interested in the Heroku lifestyle and willing to have a quick and painless deployment experience (for simple apps) are welcome to try out Piku, a tiny Heroku-inspired PaaS for your own servers:
https://github.com/piku/piku
In Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?Showing the 15 most recent of 30 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.