FAQ

Q: Why piku?

A: Partly because it's started out on the Raspberry Pi, because it's Japanese onomatopeia for 'twitch' or 'jolt', and because we knew the name would be cute and amusing.

Q: Why Python/why not Go?

A: We actually thought about doing this in Go right off the bat, but click is so cool and we needed to have uwsgi running anyway, so we caved in. But possible future directions are likely to take something like suture and port this across (or just use Caddy), doing away with uwsgi altogether.

Go also (at the time) did not have a way to vendor dependencies that we were comfortable with, and that is also why Go support fell behind. Hopefully that will change soon.

Q: Does it run under Python 3?

A: Right now, it only runs on Python 3, even though it can deploy apps written in both major versions. It began its development using 2.7 and usingclick for abstracting the simpler stuff, and we eventually switched over to 3.5 once it was supported in Debian Stretch and Raspbian since we wanted to make installing it on the Raspberry Pi as simple as possible.

Q: Why not just use dokku?

A: We used dokku daily for many projects. But it relied on a number of x64 containers that needed to be completely rebuilt for ARM, and when we decided we needed something like this (March 2016) that was barely possible - docker itself was not fully baked for ARM yet, and people were at the time just starting to get herokuish and buildstep to build on ARM.