Jacob from Waffle here. We package Waffle in a number of different Docker containers (one for each of our services) and then we ship them in a zip file along with an install script. To install, you simply unzip the file and run the install script. It prompts you for some of your environment info and then does all the work to start and link the Docker containers together for you. Hope that helps, feel free to ask any other questions you may have!
I'm always curious about how developers chose to package web apps like this for on-premises installation. As a VM image? An OS package? A set of OS packages (e.g. with third-party components in separate packages)? Using Docker? Something else?
When I worked at Scalr, we used Chef's Omnibus (https://github.com/chef/omnibus) to create "full stack" RPM and Deb packages, which basically include all your dependencies all the way down to libc (meaning libc is your only dependency) in a single "fat" package (this does mean you have to keep tabs on security updates to your dependencies; that's a pretty big tradeoff). Chef (obviously) does the same thing for their Chef server.
We'd originally tried shipping the software as a package with dependencies on other OS packages (installed using shell scripts originally, and then using Chef), but this never really worked: every enterprise would have slightly different OS configurations and the install scripts would practically never work.
We did try Docker as a deployment method, but most customers weren't comfortable with it for production deployments (or simply had systems that were too old to run Docker on). Also, orchestration tooling wasn't there yet. Bear in mind that this was a year ago, though.
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Locked-down VM images (virtual appliances) are to my knowledge quite common as well (e.g. that's how Github enterprise is distributed). With more and more customers using AWS (and other cloud providers), cloud images are becoming another viable option.
This request [1] has been hanging out in their issues since early May 2014 and has garnered 24 thumbs up and 73 +1's.
The most recent comment from a Waffle.io teammember, "We likely won't be headed into the realm of GitLab or BitBucket in the very near future, but those are the two places we would be headed next after continuing to improve our support for GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise."