OwnStack

Troubleshooting

Concrete answers for the errors people actually hit. Each linked article has the symptom in the title — match what you're seeing, jump straight there.

Deploys

  • Deploy failures — build errors, release-task errors, healthcheck failures, push-rejected.
  • "A deploy is already in progress" — there's a stuck or in-flight job. Wait, or check the dashboard's Deployments tab. ownstack app unlock <app> releases a stale dokku lock.
  • "App contains an app.json file with a formations key and cannot be manually scaled" — see Scaling processes.

Databases

  • Database auth — password authentication failed
  • could not connect to server: Connection refused — postgres service stopped. ssh dokku@<stack-ip> postgres:status <svc> to check; postgres:start <svc> to revive.
  • FATAL: database "X" does not exist — DATABASE_URL is pointing at the wrong dbname. Run ownstack db check; if password_match is true but auth still fails, the dbname is wrong. config:get and look at the path component.

DNS & routing

  • DNS & routing — domain attached but not loading; SSL cert not issuing; redirect loops.

Process & runtime

  • Container restarts in a loop — ownstack remote logs --tail 200. The process is crashing on startup. Check stack traces; common causes: missing env var, can't reach DB, bad migration.
  • Worker not draining queue — confirm worker is scaled (ssh dokku@<stack-ip> ps:report <app>); check Redis is reachable; check REDIS_URL is set.
  • Out of memory — stack instance too small for the workload, or a runaway process. Check dmesg on the stack via SSH for OOM kills. Either bump the instance or set memory limits per process via dokku resource:limit.

Auth & access

  • Wrong profile active — every ownstack command runs against whatever profile is active. ownstack profile show first; profile use <name> to switch.
  • "Permission denied (publickey)" on dokku ssh — your account's SSH key isn't on the stack. Re-provision or paste the public key into /home/dokku/.ssh/authorized_keys via ownstack ssh stack.

If none of these help

  1. Check the dashboard's Deployments tab — failure messages are usually richer there than in the CLI output.
  2. Tail the live runtime log: ownstack remote logs --tail 200 --follow.
  3. Open a doc issue on GitHub describing the symptom — that's how this section grows.