Dokku maintainer here.
This is pretty neat. I think using the compose yaml file to document what should be running is pretty powerful at smaller scales (though I'm hesitant to place data in docker volumes as people tend to delete things at will and then are shocked that their data is gone).
I once spoke with the manager of the Compose project and it was news to them that folks used it in production for deploys. The lack of tooling around zero-downtime restarts makes that frustrating, so it's exciting to see projects that introduce that in some fashion.
Cool stuff!
I love dokku, used it back in 2016. It’s a great project. I never understood the decision around the plugin ecosystem
There are just a ton of features that evolved separately from the core project. Plugins allow folks to do things in the project that the maintainers didn't envision or have time to maintain - that's actually how the datastores came to be. I think being extensible has made some things more difficult - particularly maintenance of the main project - but also made it have longevity for folks as they can mold the system to work as they'd like (the plethora of community plugins speak to that). It's a bit like how programming languages have modules or packages you can install/import into your app.
The datastore plugins were initially external as there was a ton of movement in maintaining them and it was at a different pace from the main project, though I'm now working on ways to bring them back into the core as they've stabilized quite a bit over the past decade.