[HN Gopher] Coolify's rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal
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Coolify's rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal
Author : florianmartens
Score : 123 points
Date : 2024-08-26 11:50 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.api-fiddle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.api-fiddle.com)
| gargan wrote:
| Coolify has enabled me as a technical marketer to self-host with
| ease. Much cheaper than putting something on Railway too!
| kevinak wrote:
| Coolify is awesome! We use it for lots of things at Svelte
| Society. From self-hosting marketing and analytics to running our
| own Nextcloud instance as well as a bunch of other stuff.
| federalfarmer wrote:
| I've missed the Vercel/Coolify hype train, the last "seamless"
| deployment platform I touched was Heroku.
|
| What makes Coolify so useful?
|
| It's never taken me more than 30 minutes to deploy self-hosted
| tools, from Nextcloud to Prosody, even without Docker. These
| "serverless" platforms certainly aren't any cheaper than bare
| metal and are at best marginally quicker to deploy, so what
| makes Coolify so useful to you?
|
| Is it easier to maintain, manage dependencies, or load balance
| over time? What am I missing?
| husarcik wrote:
| It's easier for me to spin up postgres and redis with
| automated backups using coolify than manually write a
| deploy/backup script.
|
| Outside that I deploy apps outside coolify as it doesn't
| scale automatically.
| b_shulha wrote:
| (not coolify)
|
| Solutions like Coolify help to save more than 30 minutes.
|
| I have recorded a sample of my own
| herokulikeinspiredbycoolifysuccesssaas where I deploy a
| WordPress instance (with MySQL and ability to enable backups
| with 1 click) in less than 3 minutes, including introduction,
| explanations and afterword.
|
| https://youtu.be/k34Zdwcsm6I
|
| Having the right app template allows to easily spin any
| number of services you need in an ultra-short time.
|
| Mine is based on the Docker Swarm, so you're getting the
| proven solution under the hood.
| b_shulha wrote:
| Okay, I see that everyone bumps their project into the
| thread, so I'll follow the mob. :D
|
| Mine is located here: https://ptah.sh
|
| Idea is the same as with Coolify, but a little bit more
| opinionated and built solely on Docker Swarm.
| kevinak wrote:
| It's not really hard to deploy these things in isolation but
| Coolify makes it very easy to do it all on the same server.
| From Git integration with CI/CD in just a few clicks to just
| random services that you might need for business purposes
| (Email marketing, Analytics, Nextcloud).
|
| 30 minutes honestly sounds like a long time compared to the
| time it takes to do this with a PaaS.
|
| Some other stuff that's nice: multiple environments (staging,
| production, you name it), Multiple deploy targets if you're
| running many servers (via Docker Swarm), support for Teams
| (in case you need multiple people to handle something, update
| environment variables, etc). There's lots.
|
| Maybe you should give it a whirl? I don't know your exact
| use-cases
| pajeets wrote:
| such a trip, beginning of this year it didnt have that many stars
|
| im banned from heztner because my card expired and i coudnt pay
| invoice, can i register as a company?
| squidhunter wrote:
| Has anyone tried out Tau [1]? It's similar to Coolify but
| supports multiple nodes which is appealing to me as I have spotty
| internet and distributing an app across several pi's in different
| locations sounds ideal.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/taubyte/tau
| kevinak wrote:
| Coolify also supports multiple nodes
| ajkjk wrote:
| I feel like it's only possible to get excited about software
| anymore if it's open source and not in the control of some
| vendor. Not because I care a lot about the ideology of free
| software, it's just because the way corporations take over and
| ruin/sell out everything has been so demoralizing.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| There's been quite some time that have the same feeling. You
| can always find exceptions of course, but in this case it is
| typically the sort that proves the rule.
|
| I personally blame the "growth at all costs" that is pervasive
| to tech industry, where "simply" being an established,
| moderately profitable, healthy company is seen as negative. It
| brings along all sorts of perverse incentives.
| meiraleal wrote:
| What are you talking about? Corporations ruining open source is
| the norm in 2024, indie devs hiding their source code from
| corps takeover is the new free software.
| federalfarmer wrote:
| >indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is
| the new free software.
|
| High power level take.
|
| The Stallman ethos of Free Software simply hasn't played out
| the way idealists thought it would. Instead, libraries are
| standardized by megacorps to farm employees inculcated into
| their design patterns and get GitHub clout chasers to fix
| bugs for free.
|
| Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND*
| license. Code is open but you can't profit from it.
| Unmodified redistribution requires credit. You can modify the
| code for personal use but you can't redistribute it without
| permission.
|
| This model at least eliminates the potential maliciousness of
| a lot of closed-source software while leaving room for indie
| devs to profit from their work.
|
| *[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/]
| b_shulha wrote:
| There is a Fair Source model, driven by Sentry:
| https://fair.io
| federalfarmer wrote:
| Didn't know about this, glad to know others are seeing a
| similar problem! I've definitely tried to monetize self-
| hosted projects that could benefit from Fair Core in
| particular.
|
| The flexibility of the licensing text is also nice as
| it'd be very easy to modify the standard "two years to
| open source" timetable or drop in a different license
| type like GPL:
|
| https://github.com/keygen-
| sh/fcl.dev/blob/master/FCL-1.0-MIT...
| trollbridge wrote:
| AGPL3 gets somewhat near this; if someone wants to profit
| in the cloud from it, they have to share all changes they
| make (and in theory then anyone else could go run a for
| profit or free service in the cloud or locally with the
| same new code).
| meiraleal wrote:
| Sharing code back isn't enough. AGPLv3 falls short in
| ensuring the profits from the tools get shared with the
| creators and maintainers
| narrator wrote:
| That sounds like the early 90s when you had to pay for
| all dev tools and even pay royalties for how many copies
| of your product you sold with that library. Most people
| had to roll their own crappy half-assed homebrew data
| structures because otherwise you'd have to pay for
| expensive libraries.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > they have to share all changes they make
|
| Only with users who access the service.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Mostly because many decided that to make money, they had to
| go with VC money and business friendly licenses, instead of
| dual license GPL + commercial.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND*
| license.
|
| That seems akin to saying "vegan food really needs pork",
| since by definition a NC licence can't be open source. Not
| to mention such licences cause as many, if not more,
| problems than they solve.
|
| https://community.oscedays.org/t/why-are-non-commercial-
| lice...
| XCSme wrote:
| Open-source is rarely sustainable, I use many open-source
| projects, and I support/sponsor them when possible, but many
| simply don't survive long and the builder loses interested.
|
| With Coolify it's different, because many companies are willing
| to sponsor the project, so it's already sustainable.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >However, Coolify's explosive growth in 2024 suggests we're
| witnessing a different level of adoption and impact on the wider
| software community.
|
| This worries me about the state of Github more than anything
| else. For the past couple years now we've been seeing these
| "viral" repos that catch on for one reason or another, get tens
| of thousands of stars in a few months (in part due to posts like
| this), and then languish. Time was that a few thousand Github
| stars really meant something; that a project had steadily gained
| support over years and was at a place that was production ready
| for the masses. Not so anymore.
| andrasbacsai wrote:
| Most recent Github stars are came from big tech youtuber's
| videos.
|
| GH stars of Coolify built over 4 years.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Most recent Github stars are came from big tech youtuber's
| videos.
|
| That's kind of my point. It's becoming impossible now to tell
| the difference between long running stable repos vs something
| someone with social media followers just started pushing by
| stars alone anymore.
| nine_k wrote:
| A star growth chart, summarized by month, would give a good
| idea of whether this is steady growth or a meteoric rise
| overnight. (Storage costs of such a chart are negligible.)
| password4321 wrote:
| > _A star growth chart_
|
| ... as is included in the article (vs Dokku), FWIW.
|
| https://blog.api-fiddle.com/post-media/0008-graph.png per
| https://star-history.com
| password4321 wrote:
| > _GH stars of Coolify built over 4 years_
|
| That is not how I understood the chart in the article (vs
| Dokku), 2024 hockey stick!
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I liked coolify when I was hosting my wordpress, bitwarden, and a
| couple of personal projects via github on a VPS, it made the
| annoying step of getting certs for all the https domains into a
| one click operation.
|
| Once I forgot my password to the admin panel and it just wasn't
| that big of deal to blow away the VPS and set it all up from
| scratch. Feels good to not be anxious about that.
| jaredlunde wrote:
| Shameless plug but I built https://flexstack.com for similar
| reasons. I wanted a Render/Vercel alternative on my own AWS
| account and all of the other options either didn't go far enough
| or were way too expensive for someone bootstrapping.
| yodon wrote:
| Marketing developer tools is commonly much harder than
| developing them.
|
| The hard thing about adopting a product like yours is that as a
| potential customer you never know whether the thing you want to
| do is actually going to be easy or hard or impossible or time
| consuming.
|
| The home page preaches all the right things, but it's very busy
| and information dense and yet nothing on the home page gives me
| enough detail for me to know if it will actually work for me
| for real.
|
| Figuring out whether a product like this will actually work for
| me is the real cost I'm looking at, not the $10/month cost. At
| present, the figuring out if it will work for me cost looks
| arbitrarily high, because I have no information to go on on the
| home page without trying to work through an actual deployment
| on my own.
|
| The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool. It needs
| to focus instead on explaining things. Adding words, either
| spoken or on title cards, would help significantly. Yes, I
| understand there are words in the video - they are words that
| talk about goals of your company, not words that tell me what
| is going on in the video. I see lots of things that I recognize
| or that make sense, but I don't know where it's going or what
| I'm watching when it starts, so I have no schema in my mind to
| organize what I'm watching. Getting rid of the "music," or
| replacing it with much less distracting audio, would help as
| well - it makes it much harder to concentrate on trying to
| understand what I'm seeing. Remember, I am watching the video
| with the goal of understanding "will this do the specific
| things I need it to do" not "do we agree on the high level
| goals of what would be great to have."
|
| Coolify is winning today, not because its tech is better than
| competitors, but because it's tech is more understandable than
| competitors.
| jaredlunde wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! I appreciate your honesty and your
| willingness to share.
|
| > The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool
|
| I have been working on a Loom version. Before putting a lot
| of time into the demo, I wanted to validate that people were
| watching it (and they are). I quickly put something together
| in iMovie that would introduce the product in <1 minute, was
| not trying to be cool. It stings to hear, but I accept that
| was the vibe.
|
| > it's very busy and information dense ... nothing on the
| home page gives me enough detail
|
| It has ~the same number of words as Render/Coolify/Vercel, so
| I will take your point that I'm not yet telling the story as
| well.
| XCSme wrote:
| Does your platforms support 1-Click (premade) apps?
| jaredlunde wrote:
| Something like this? https://vercel.com/templates
|
| Not at the moment unfortunately. I understand it's more
| friction, but you can just clone any of those repos and
| deploy them to FlexStack in 1-click by linking your GitHub
| account.
| XCSme wrote:
| No, something like Coolify apps:
| https://s3.amazonaws.com/i.snag.gy/iyzfMX.jpg
| jaredlunde wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying. Of those you can 1-click deploy
| Git-based and Docker-based apps except Docker Compose,
| since containers are deployed to an ECS cluster. Self-
| hosted databases are out of scope for what we're trying
| to do. We're focused instead on making it dead simple to
| integrate with AWS-managed resources (via resource RBAC,
| network rules).
| spikey_sanju wrote:
| We've been using Coolify to power all our products. It's a great
| tool for quickly starting new projects. We're very happy with it.
| We got our servers from Hetzner and we're not looking back.
| number6 wrote:
| Sounds great! Any resources on where to start? This thread is
| the first time I heard from that
| muratsu wrote:
| Question for folks who use Coolify in prod, where do you host
| your stuff and how much is your monthly bill?
| zoomzoom wrote:
| At Coherence (withcoherence.com - I'm a cofounder) we are
| delivering the open-source benefits of Coolify (less vendor lock-
| in, cheap hosting costs) via our open-source CNC framework
| (cncframework.com) while still keeping a hosted SaaS control
| plane that eliminates the "few hours of fiddling with setup" that
| the blog author minimizes here. Maintenance and configuration
| complexity over time (as you customize and use click-ops to
| configure) are endless, especially as you get more usage or host
| more projects.
|
| Coolify is awesome software, and alongside similar tools like
| Caprover, Dokku, and Cloud66, it has its role. But for business
| use-cases I believe that giving up managed cloud services is too
| big a leap to make sense, and that a middle-ground approach will
| win in the long term.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| That's quite a confusing name, it took me quite a while to
| realise you aren't talking about computer numerical control.
| XCSme wrote:
| I was using https://caprover.com but I'm slowly migrating all
| services to Coolify.
|
| CapRover still has a few things that it does better (better
| custom-domain support, more 1-click apps, integrated NetData
| monitoring, etc.), but overall Coolify is a lot more beginner-
| friendly and simpler to use.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| I feel like Vercel needs VPS options in order to compete with
| Coolify.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Just an ad, hasn't even even been spell checked, c'mon can we
| stop with this
| digging wrote:
| I was definitely expecting more substance, pretty weak article
| even if it was intended to be more than an ad.
| thih9 wrote:
| As an outsider to Vercel, Next.js and server side JS in general,
| I feel like I'm missing a lot.
|
| > What happened next with Next.js and Vercel is far less
| magical...
|
| What happened - could someone elaborate or share a link?
| emahhh wrote:
| I've been trying Coolify lately and the idea is great. I really
| hope it gets more support from companies. I wanna see where this
| project could go.
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