[HN Gopher] Coolify: Open-source and self-hostable Heroku / Netl...
___________________________________________________________________
Coolify: Open-source and self-hostable Heroku / Netlify / Vercel
alternative
Author : vanschelven
Score : 340 points
Date : 2025-04-02 12:41 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (coolify.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (coolify.io)
| dan_can_code wrote:
| Very cool options here. I'm always looking for options to throw
| something on a spare raspberry pi and this looks like a great
| tool to self-host.
| hk1337 wrote:
| I don't mean it as discouragement but, at least for me, I would
| choose Heroku or Netlify because I don't want to self host it. I
| want someone else to manage all those bits for me.
|
| It's good experience building the app though and good to have
| alternatives available.
| colesantiago wrote:
| I'm glad that the age of platform decay and VC backed companies
| that these OSS alternatives exist to counter this destructive
| trend of extraction based vendor lock in.
|
| Vercel, Netlify and Heroku will inevitably not exist in 10-20
| years but Coolify will, humming along on a regular VPS.
| jbaber wrote:
| As long as you "own" the domain name yourself, so can point
| anywhere, what's the problem with using a platform and
| expecting to have to move someday?
| nine_k wrote:
| Money, I suppose? Heroku is notoriously trivial to use, and
| notoriously expensive for the amount of storage and compute
| you get.
|
| A semi-successful but not heavily monetized side project on
| Heroku could cost you an arm and a leg, while running the
| same thing on some Hetzner box under Dokku, along with a
| couple of others, may be not that much noticeable.
| glenngillen wrote:
| Heroku has been around for ~17 years at this point. Why do
| you think it disappears in the next 10?
| anamexis wrote:
| Because Salesforce decides it's not profitable enough to be
| worth it, or they want to close Heroku off to Salesforce
| customers, or any number of other reasons
| matt-p wrote:
| I mean obviously we're not really privy to market share but
| I'd say they've had a pretty massive decline in say the
| past 5 years or so.
| benatkin wrote:
| Right, it should say that Heroku has already disappeared.
|
| It's still there but feels like something different from
| what it once was.
| schneems wrote:
| I work there. We are still around. Maybe not making waves
| as much as we used to but still hacking on stuff.
|
| Right now I'm in the progress of rolling out a new
| platform powered by Cloud Native Buildpacks that allow
| you to build an OCI image locally. Here's some language
| specific getting started (local) tutorials
| https://github.com/heroku/buildpacks#heroku-cloud-native-
| bui...
| benatkin wrote:
| Sweet. I know. I even have the $5/mo plan just to keep
| https://anigram.herokuapp.com/ online :)
|
| Nice to hear about the buildpacks. I use Containerfiles
| but since switching to Podman and Fedora/RockyLinux I've
| seen stuff about OpenShift which supports buildpacks.
| https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-base-container/
| mtkd wrote:
| Migration to fly.io is simple enough ... it is much
| closer to the original Heroku both technically and as
| company (if you ever need to contact them)
| benatkin wrote:
| For me the heroku database and heroku add-ons were
| essential, if I was going to use Heroku. Without that I
| may as well use a IaaS.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Because it was acquired by Salesforce.
| hk1337 wrote:
| That's great. I didn't mean any discouragement as much as to
| say, I would probably not promote its self hosting ability as
| much. Promote that it's open source and keep working on it
| because I am sure you'll learn a lot about the field space.
| If it comes down to it that Heroku, Netlify, Vercel, and all
| other PaaS companies are gone, I will most likely just do a
| VPS or server just for my app than launch my own PaaS.
|
| tl;dr if I am looking for a PaaS, I don't care that it's self
| hostable. I don't want to host it, that's why I am looking.
| bofadeez wrote:
| The point is the UX is identical with Coolify on a cheap
| VPS compared to overpriced Heroku/Netlify/Vercel.
|
| Just comparing exact performance and price and features.
|
| A blank linux VPS has a different UI/UX.
|
| Why does it seem like you're deliberately misunderstanding?
| Do you work for a platform?
| hk1337 wrote:
| I feel like you got lost in my example/rambling that I
| probably shouldn't have said like that.
|
| If I am a user looking for some place to host my
| application, I do not care that one service can be self
| hosted. I have already made my decision that I am going
| to host it somewhere else, so I am not going self host
| the PaaS just to host my application myself.
|
| It can still be self hostable, just put it in the
| developer documentation and not necessarily promoting it
| so much on the main page.
| benatkin wrote:
| A good way to promote that it's open source is to describe
| it as being self hostable and have a get starting page that
| quickly says how to self host it.
|
| As for user experience, Vercel has a lot of UX talent but
| it hasn't been a great user experience for me. I had a
| glitch on their end that prevented the dashboard from
| loading for me and it took over a week to resolve, and
| transferring a domain out turned out to be a manual
| process. Meanwhile I have had great user experiences with
| spartan open source projects.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| I use (and love) Heroku in my day job, but when experimenting
| with Hetzner servers (and the like), it's nice to have a
| GUI/framework like Coolify to manage the servers in a similar
| manner.
| ezekg wrote:
| Does this project make its money via the cloud offering, or via
| sponsors? It's kind of unclear.
| kikki wrote:
| Both - but primary the cloud offering. The main author
| (https://x.com/heyandras) is pretty open about the project
| revenue its sources. If I remember correctly they're at about
| 10k MRR mostly from Coolify Cloud.
|
| Edit: Latest "post" (xeet?)
| https://mobile.x.com/heyandras/status/1901894087604916396 I
| could find about revenue
| cedel2k1 wrote:
| Love my Coolify Setup!
| maelito wrote:
| Also checkout Dokploy. Incredible to leave Vercel.
| s4i wrote:
| The mandatory link about Dokploy's unclear/questionable
| license: https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy/discussions/3
| sneak wrote:
| This seems to be an issue in the PaaS space. The guy who runs
| CapRover illegally changed the license on it to be nonfree,
| without copyright assignments from any of the contributors
| who worked on it when it was free software.
|
| https://github.com/caprover/caprover/blob/master/LICENSE
|
| It's deceptive, because it starts out saying APACHE LICENSE
| but then adds a bunch of nonfree provisions to it, making it
| NOT Apache licensed.
|
| It's especially galling when all of these people are trying
| to nickel and dime their users with this open core nonsense
| while their business wouldn't exist if not for docker, k8s,
| postgres, mysql, node, php, all being open source.
| huksley wrote:
| Remember all those horror stories about ridiculous bills from
| public cloud providers? I also got $4.5k bill once for simple
| mistake on AWS.
|
| So I decided to build Vercel for your own servers - DollarDeploy,
| which manages servers and deploys NextJS apps (without docker)
| and docker compose configs to your server. We don't have self
| hosted or open source but cloud version starts from $1/mo
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Now is a good time to sell licenses around the world.
|
| Edit: just noticed you are in Finland. You might be exactly
| what I've been looking for lately
| frainfreeze wrote:
| I m curious, how do you deploy Next.js apps w/o docker? Self
| hosted nodejs? Also how much do you lag behind vercel releases?
| nine_k wrote:
| What may be mysterious here? You can have multiple versions
| of Node installed if needed, and every app brings in the
| entire dependency tree, isolated from everything else.
|
| If you trust your apps enough, you don't even need chroot.
| CoolCold wrote:
| I have much more peace of mind when it's not in chroot but
| even better inside systemd unit and all that ReadonlyPath
| and capabilities applied. In the ideal case network access
| beyond localhost and may be db is denied for greater safety
| nine_k wrote:
| Sounds quite a bit like a container!
| huksley wrote:
| Hi, I build NextJs in standalone mode per docs and it works
| pretty well, we keep it running using pm2 but I want to
| migrate to systems service. I would say any NextJs should
| work but we run DollarDeploy ourselves using NextJs 14
| crudbug wrote:
| I was also looking at alternatives -
|
| K8S-based -
|
| https://github.com/cozystack/cozystack
|
| https://github.com/kubero-dev/kubero
|
| https://github.com/pluralsh/plural
|
| DCR-based -
|
| https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify
|
| https://github.com/dokku/dokku/
|
| https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy
|
| https://github.com/swiftwave-org/swiftwave
|
| Most of these projects are maintained by a single maintainer; for
| business critical apps look elsewhere.
| whydid wrote:
| Because businesses always support their software better than
| individuals?
| edoceo wrote:
| Bus factor maybe? Which is mitigated by good
| community/contributors
| cchance wrote:
| The amount of random 1 man opensource projects holding up
| industries is shocking XD
| sublinear wrote:
| It's worse for corporate private source projects. Often the
| docs are lacking and it's essentially a 0-man project.
| dv_dt wrote:
| 0 man + one accounts dept
| o1o1o1 wrote:
| Second this! I just got hired for a short-term project to
| extend a payment solution I once wrote when I was
| employed by that company.
|
| I was amazed to find that a) nobody maintained the
| project after I left, there were only two minor fixes
| because their house was on fire, and b) I really took the
| time to write almost complete documentation on all the
| important topics, which helped me get back on track
| faster.
|
| You are absolutely right, and I have experienced this
| most of the time. The problem is that it is an uphill
| battle to explain to most stakeholders why you are
| "wasting" so much time on non-customer facing
| documentation.
|
| It is hard enough to convince even technical stakeholders
| (e.g. product owners) to write automated tests.
|
| While at the time I mostly think it's bad, later on it
| forces them to pay me twice as much, so I guess it's not
| as bad as I always think in those moments :D
| o1o1o1 wrote:
| He did not say "companies vs individuals", he said "single
| maintainer", which is obviously a high risk factor to
| consider IMHO.
|
| I wonder why they all start their own projects instead of
| putting their heads together. They could achieve so much more
| and make a bit more money on the side, while each of them
| would have to spend less time on it. It would also attract
| risk-averse companies.
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| This is true for most alternatives, but not for Coolify. I
| am the second maintainer of Coolify and Andras and I
| maintain most of Core Coolify while we have 4 other
| maintainers helping with support and the docs and a few
| other maintainers who help with CLI and some other stuff.
| networked wrote:
| Thanks for the links. I didn't know about SwiftWave.
|
| I have a page with a comparison table of self-hosted PaaS on my
| site: https://dbohdan.com/self-hosted-paas. It only covers
| options that don't use Kubernetes. I have just added SwiftWave.
| notpushkin wrote:
| I'm building another one, based on Docker Swarm:
| https://lunni.dev/
|
| My goal is to build an intuitive, snappy UI that helps you
| but doesn't get in your way. Happy to answer any questions
| and would love to hear what you think :-)
| frainfreeze wrote:
| There is also piku, sort of a tiny dokku;
| https://github.com/piku/piku
| password4321 wrote:
| The most recent significant discussion of this topic (271
| comments 7 months ago) with anecdotal recommendations of
| several of these:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41358020 _Dokku: My
| favorite personal serverless platform_
|
| Which was nearly immediately preceded by a smaller (62
| comments) Coolify discussion also on the front page:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41356239 _Coolify's rise
| to fame, and why it could be a big deal_
| theanonymousone wrote:
| What is DCR?
| selexin wrote:
| I'm wondering the same thing. Docker Container Registry
| maybe?
| theanonymousone wrote:
| Makes sense.
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| This is true for most alternatives, but not for Coolify.
|
| I am the second maintainer of Coolify and Andras and I maintain
| most of Core Coolify while we have 4 other maintainers helping
| with support and the docs and a few other maintainers who help
| with CLI and some other stuff.
| amanzi wrote:
| I've been using Coolify for about a year now and have been very
| happy with it. It's really low maintenance, it has built in
| backups for your apps and databases, decent security by default,
| and is super easy to use. I log into the underlying VMs once per
| month to do an apt update/upgrade, and that's about it.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Btw, did you know about unattended upgrades?
|
| Just curious as the stated reason for the stated reason would
| become almost unnecessary with that
|
| https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades
| turbocon wrote:
| I maybe the only person on here that had no idea this is a
| thing, but thank you this is incredible
| sgarland wrote:
| Just don't do something stupid like changing system Python,
| because it will silently fail. I learned this the fun way, by
| inheriting someone else's travesty of a setup (spoiler: if
| you have to hardlink random shared libraries to get stuff to
| work, that's a good indicator that maybe you shouldn't have
| forcibly upgraded the system's Python installation), and then
| finding out that despite reporting success, no packages had
| been updated in the past year.
|
| Security lost their minds. I was in awe of the miasma of bad
| decisions that had been made. Perhaps my favorite was that in
| the script that created this abomination, it blocked Postgres
| from being updated automatically via editing a file with sed,
| but they forgot to use -i, so it just, you know, spat out the
| modified line to stdout and then went on its merry way. This
| was not an issue however, since as mentioned, unattended-
| upgrades was broken, so nothing updated.
| nikodunk wrote:
| Same here! Been self hosting on hetzner for about a year now,
| and support the OSS project for $10/month. Love how it can
| auto-deploy new git commits, deploy Postgres or any database to
| the same or separate servers, and you can cram as many apps or
| docker containers onto a single VPS or move them to a separate
| server when you need to.
|
| Finally, little utilities like snapdrop or mosquitto are a
| button click away. Strongly recommended - it's liberating! I
| don't need to re-learn every PaaS vendor's system - my PaaS
| comes with me. And a junior can be onboarded to this UI way
| easier than dokku or kamal IMO.
| o1o1o1 wrote:
| Another commenter mentioned that zero downtime deployments
| are not possible, isn't this a loss in your opinion, or did
| you find a way to do it using Coolify?
| clait wrote:
| They were mistaken or maybe referring to an older version,
| because I definitively use rolling zero downtime updates
| from commits
| Onavo wrote:
| For true zero downtime, the connections have to be slowly
| drained, i.e. two all instances may exist at the same
| time. Does coolify support that?
| samfundev wrote:
| Coolify does support zero downtime deployments, but the
| documentation isn't live yet:
| https://github.com/coollabsio/documentation-
| coolify/blob/640...
|
| It uses docker stop once the new container is healthy
| with a 30 second timeout, which I believe lets existing
| connections drain out.
| gargan wrote:
| "Move them to a separate server" - is that easy to do using
| Coolify?
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| Yes, you can move or clone to a separate server with a
| single click. Only volumes are not currently supported when
| doing this.
| ansc wrote:
| How? I can't find it in the docs.
| gargan wrote:
| Me neither. I found this
| https://github.com/Geczy/coolify-migration but if there's
| a native way to do it that would be great.
| tharos47 wrote:
| I have (re)installed it recently and I can't find the apps
| backup. The only backup that seems to run in settings is the
| coolify instance backup.
|
| Moreover I don't see a way to restore a coolify hosted app from
| the gui (couldn't find one in the doc too). The documentation
| around traefik and caddy is lackink a bit. It seems they want
| you to expose the coolify server directly on the internet. I
| prefer to host my services behind a cloudflare tunnel and it
| was a bit janky to setup.
|
| It's low maintenance and stable and certainly has come a long
| way since I tried it about 2 years ago but there is still many
| improvements to make.
| aaomidi wrote:
| I've been fascinated by how little developers know how to take a
| service they have, and make it accessible on something like their
| home network.
|
| It's honestly a shocker to me. There's so much knowledge about
| the stack that gets lost with these services.
| sgarland wrote:
| It's because by and large, web devs do not know computing
| fundamentals, because they've had no reason to learn them.
|
| If your language handles memory management for you, why would
| you learn about it?
|
| If poor performance in your app can be dealt with by spinning
| up more copies of it, why would you spend time profiling your
| code?
|
| And, explicitly to your point, if networking can be hand-waved
| away by tools like ngrok, why would you need to know how it
| works?
|
| And so on. People who grew up on computers in the 90s, 80s,
| etc. largely do know these things, because they had to.
| Understanding those fundamentals, as in any industry, pays
| dividends.
|
| It's incredibly frustrating to me that at almost all companies
| I've worked for, when I suggest we self-host something instead
| of forking over millions to AWS, it's an instant no. The most
| honest answer I've had so far was "that skill set is difficult
| to hire for." It is, I agree - and how do you think we got to
| this point? By perpetuating the status quo, and enriching the
| hyperscalers, who seem to have no problem hiring for that skill
| set.
| aaomidi wrote:
| > when I suggest we self-host something instead of forking
| over millions to AWS, it's an instant no.
|
| This is something that bothers me a lot, and I've given up.
| It's to a point where we're paying thousands of dollars
| sometimes a year for 200 lines of code.
|
| It also kinda makes it harder to sometimes just practice
| engineering skills.
|
| For example, I wrote a just in time access request solution
| at work. However, okta also has one of these. Funny thing is,
| the one I wrote is a proof of concept - so it's a little
| rough around the edges but nothing spectacularly wrong.
|
| I then used the okta solution for this and my god, what an
| absolute mess of software they have.
|
| 1. They don't have the ability to have the requester specify
| a duration of access they want. It all has to be hardcoded.
|
| 2. Imagine you request access to group A for 3 hours. 2.5
| hours later, you're thinking "Hmm, I think I'm going to need
| more access. So you make another access request for 3 hours.
| After half an hour that first access expires, and just
| removes your access. Even if you still have 2.5 hours left
| from your second access.
|
| 3. Without even trying, I got the backend for setting up the
| access requests into an inconsistent state. Okta's UI is
| insisting I can't delete a group because it's used by an
| access request form. However, when I was making that access
| request form the save button partially failed, so now there's
| this dangling foreign key somewhere in their database.
| Inconsistencies like that in software that's supposed to be
| the source of truth of access is just absolutely
| unacceptable.
|
| 4. Okta "removes" access by removing you from the group that
| you had requested. However, if there's any issues with Okta's
| provisioning code, from Okta's perspective you don't have
| access but the third party service might still think you do.
| They don't _remove_ the access from the third party first
| before removing it from their own source of truth.
|
| What's depressing is that in my proof of concept, before even
| trying Okta's product I thought about and planned around all
| of these problems.
|
| ---
|
| Anyway rant over, but at least in hiring I am very adamant
| about the candidate knowing how to get a basic website up and
| running and understanding NAT/Port Forwarding/HTTP(S)
| Proxies. Why? Well, when our customers run into issues with
| our software our engineers need to have the fundamentals to
| help troubleshoot.
| icelancer wrote:
| Had a bunch of problems trying to host / run this on an internal-
| only network.
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| Exactly what problems did you have?
| pier25 wrote:
| Tried it for a bit. Paid one month of the subscription.
|
| The dashboard is incredibly clunky and at the time they didn't
| have SSL for db connections (not sure about now). A lot of stuff
| you need to know what you're doing like configuring tags for
| Traefik etc.
|
| The deal breaker was it didn't have zero downtime deploys. Any
| pending request when you update an app is simply killed.
|
| I was expecting something like Heroku or Vercel but this ain't
| it.
|
| Ended up concluding that if I wanted to run/deploy apps on my own
| VPS I'd just use Kamal or Dokku. Both have zero downtime deploys,
| certbot, proxy, etc.
| msy wrote:
| Kamal has a lot of rough edges (still can't support custom
| certs for example) but is still a far more mature solution. It
| does less but better.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Kamal proxy is good enough to sit behind a load balancer. I
| would not let it be what a client sees. There are some major
| features missing and it just hasn't been battle tested enough
| to be subjected to DDoS type traffic, etc.
|
| Overall, I do like the Kamal approach which basically boils
| down to the fact that instead of a complicated cluster
| orchestration system the developers decide which machines
| code runs on.
|
| Once it has real support for doing DB migrations as a part of
| its deploys, a proxy that is less magical and more feature
| rich, and its CLI fixes some poorly documented and frankly
| somewhat annoying issues it will be a real workhorse.
|
| I am also curious about Dokku + k3s. I have used Dokku for a
| long time but only on a single host.
| shash7 wrote:
| Had the exact same experience. Incredibly clunky UI/UX.
|
| For docker-compose, I had to create a specific one for Coolify
| because it goes and does its own magic.
|
| Tried Dokploy(similar service), better UI but lacking in docs.
|
| In the right hands, these products could be so much better.
| zachlatta wrote:
| Dokploy unfortunately isn't nearly as mature as Coolify.
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| That is true, Coolify supports magic variables to make your
| life easier by automatically creating values like passwords
| and URLs, but you are not forced to use them, it is just
| there to make your life easier, some improvements to the
| naming and docs for the magic vars are planned.
| ansc wrote:
| Dokploy is not open-source. Broken license.
| o1o1o1 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. I was thinking of giving it a try, but
| hearing that zero downtime deployments don't work is a deal
| breaker for me, which is sad because Coolify looks amazing
| otherwise.
|
| I do wonder though, why do we even need an alternative to Dokku
| when it seems to provide everything we need?
| k__ wrote:
| I tried it too, but gave up quickly.
|
| If you don't have issues with CLI tools, you're better off with
| stuff like Ansible, Salt, Chef, Puppet, Nix, Guix, etc. Deploy
| LGTM or SigNoz alongside your apps and you're good to go.
| cromka wrote:
| Nix is used for app deployments?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Nothing stops people from using it that way.
|
| I would kind of prefer appimages / flatpak's though ?
|
| I think appimages are the best way if we can get aside from
| the fact of some limitiations it has if I remember like if
| you build the project on X then code can only run on linux
| versions on Y where there is some relation b/w X and Y , I
| know its very vague... It was some reddit post.
|
| Man , I have watched / read so many posts that I only
| vaguely remember things but I really don't have exact
| bookmarks and it just feels so repetitive and kind of
| humiliating to say these again and again....
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| If you are using Nixpacks, then yes it is used to build you
| docker image.
| zachlatta wrote:
| FYI that I did a bounty for database SSL connections and they
| implemented it, so they should be live now!
| airstrike wrote:
| There's no "that" after FYI. It's "For your information,
| <foo>"
|
| Sorry, but FYI this is my biggest pet peeve of all time.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Understandable , have a nice day.
| samfundev wrote:
| Coolify does support zero downtime deployments, but the
| documentation isn't live yet:
| https://github.com/coollabsio/documentation-coolify/blob/640...
| pier25 wrote:
| Is this new? I tested it back in October 2024 and it didn't
| work.
|
| I set up an app that would take a couple of seconds to return
| a request. Started a long benchmark and did a deploy. Got
| some errors right after deploying because the pending
| requests were killed.
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| SSL support for DBs was added in a recent release.
|
| A new UI is planned and under development as we speak.
|
| Improvements to zero downtime deployments and our overall
| deployment flow, including scaling across multiple servers, are
| under planning and will be released later this year.
| geek_at wrote:
| After trying coolify I went to dokploy which makes more sense
| to me and doesn't have any upsells
| W6zVktFA wrote:
| Coolify unfortunately didn't click with me, and I had a bad
| experience with a Redis database, so I stopped using it.
|
| I would recommend Elestio (eles[dot]io) as an alternative which
| isn't open source, or self-hostable, but met my primary goal of
| drastically reducing cloud costs. And you can bring your own
| cloud/server, though I'm choosing to also rent from Hetzner
| through Elestio.
|
| I'm running two redis databases on machines with 3 cpus, 4gb ram,
| and 80gb storage for about $80 total (the machines are billed
| hourly, but you get the max monthly bill up front).
| jbryu wrote:
| Interesting, what was bad about your Redis experience on
| Coolify? I was just about to do the same for a personal
| project.
| SomeUserName432 wrote:
| > Coolify unfortunately didn't click with me, and I had a bad
| experience with a Redis database, so I stopped using it.
|
| I tried using coolify and I gave up due to every ~third redis
| connection failing to connect.
|
| No idea what was up with that, ended up going with CapRover.
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| What was the issue you had with Redis?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I'm happy using coolify. I self host on my Mac Studio as the
| control plane and deploy to digital ocean. I'm currently looking
| to host in Canada instead, but not having much luck. I considered
| hosting my deployments locally as well, I don't get much traffic,
| but haven't made a decision yet.
|
| Overall it's good software that just does what it says it will.
| My needs aren't particularly complex, but they aren't totally
| trivial either. It does a great job orchestrating things without
| me needing to worry much about the inner workings.
|
| I've done these things manually for a long time and I would be
| fine continuing to do that, but... I've got a job, kids, other
| hobbies, etc. It has been great to have a simple control plane to
| automate a lot of it for me. I find it makes it more likely for
| me to build and deploy something in the first place, which is
| what really counts for me at the end of the day.
|
| The discord has also been a good resource. They're very helpful
| and the vibe is very positive in my experience. It has been, and
| still seems like an ecosystem worth investing in.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Coolify is cool, pun intended, but a bit clunky (maybe due to the
| PHP nature of it), I recommend Dokploy these days.
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| A new UI is being planned and developed as we speak, so the
| UI/UX will improve a lot. PHP has nothing to do with this.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| By PHP I meant more that it causes full page renders (ie
| server side rendered) vs client side rendered frameworks like
| React.
| LeicaLatte wrote:
| I would love to move away from railway to Coolify or dokploy.
| Someday.
| matus_congrady wrote:
| I'm sorry for being a bit off-topic, but I'm a founder of a PaaS
| company myself, and I think that what we offer is a great
| alternative to Coolify for companies that need a more "managed"
| and reliable infra.
|
| https://stacktape.com is a Heroku/Vercel-like PaaS platform that
| deploys directly to your own AWS account.
|
| It supports both serverless (lambda functions), and serverful
| (AWS ECS Fargate or EC2) deployments. Besides that, it supports
| other AWS infrastructure resources, such as RDS MySQL/Postgres,
| Redis, ElasticSearch, etc..
|
| You can deploy from console, using git-push-to-deploy, or even
| use preview deployments (ephemeral environments for every PR).
|
| Compared to alternatives, it's both very easy to use, and
| flexible/extensible at the same time. You can use it to quickly
| deploy anything in a few minutes, yet it will be sufficient to
| cover even complex infrastructure needs you might run into in the
| future.
| elorm wrote:
| It's very much on-topic. You're just shilling your own product
| under the thread of a similar product, nothing to be ashamed
| off chief. Shill away.
| matus_congrady wrote:
| It's completely true, and I AM ashamed for doing it. But it's
| a terrible time to be a PaaS founder, since there are very
| few new projects being started at the moment. Without
| exaggeration, I think there are somewhere between 10% and 20%
| of new projects being started (which is the only point people
| will actually choose to use our platform) compared to 2022.
| Hard times, lower standards. Sorry. We've got ~40 website
| visitors from that comment so far, and I can't pass on that.
| vinibrito wrote:
| Well, what did you see that gave you that impression? About
| less new projects being started. This got me super curious.
| matus_congrady wrote:
| 3 things:
|
| - Situation on the SWE hiring market. It's way harder to
| find a job.
|
| - I personally know people from SW dev agencies that are
| all saying its very hard to find an opportunity (project)
| to work on.
|
| - In fact, I'm 99% convinced that we're in a recession,
| even though its not official. Companies are cutting costs
| left and right. And think about it this way. When a
| company invests in a software, it's an investment for
| them, which will eventually pay for itself in a few
| years. But if the company is struggling to just stay
| alive, investments are the first thing they cut.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| No idea why there's almost no PaaS solution for Kubernetes. It
| would be a great platform with some add-ons. I know there's
| Porter but only on AWS and Azure if I understand correctly. Which
| is fine for many use cases I guess. Still I want to self-host for
| dev without huge cost.
|
| There's also Korifi which implements the Cloud Foundry API on
| Kubernetes but it's still in progress and its future might be
| uncertain.
| SalariedSlave wrote:
| What about https://syself.com/ ? Haven't used it yet, but I
| read about in on HN and bookmarked it for future reference..
| ofrzeta wrote:
| I hadn't heard about it but it seems just like management for
| Kubernetes not a layer on top to enable PaaS, although it has
| managed databases. Also it doesn't seem to be open source.
| Thanks for the pointer, though.
| sgarland wrote:
| Did you see [0] above, from crudbug? They listed a few.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43588786
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| We are currently investigating and planning something for
| scaling, so stay tuned, it may happen soon.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Perhaps a bit tangential on the subject, but in the same spirit -
| does anyone know of an open source self-hostable alternative to
| runpod/vast for managing your GPUs? Our small team has some bare
| metal servers and I'd like to try something light to manage /
| reserve instances w/ the convenience of a webui and a place where
| the team can see at a glance who is using what, and eventually
| some notes on how long each deployment is likely to take (self
| filled ofc).
| breadislove wrote:
| we are using claudie(.io) together with ray. but we put a lot
| time into the infrastructure but we managed to cut our cost for
| a factor of 20x by doing this.
| theanonymousone wrote:
| I have also been using Coolify happily since its early(?) days
| (mid 2022 IIRC). One big plus for me is that there is nothing to
| be installed on the client: No CLI, etc. In my specific use case,
| I switch laptops I work with, so it's a huge advantage that I can
| just open the UI in the browser and do my work. Of course there
| is room for improvements in many corners of it, but I couldn't
| get any of the alternatives to works the same way, yet.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| One alternative that works is an nginx reverese proxy and 10
| minutes of configuration :P
| theanonymousone wrote:
| Replacement: I wrote something here and then deleted it. You
| may also want to rethink about your comment.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Plus points for any language, I dislike how Vercel and Nelify
| build up on AWS and then we only get JS/TS/Go, or WebAssembly
| gimmicks.
| intev wrote:
| Anyone know how this compares to caprover?
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| Coolify is much more feature rich and well maintained with a
| clear open source license.
| ksajadi wrote:
| I have a big issue with any self hosted alternative to _name your
| paas here_. Every time I try one I find myself maintaining the
| PaaS instead of maintaining my app, which defeats the whole
| purpose of a PaaS
| upmostly wrote:
| Tried this but ended up building our own competitor:
| Hypership.dev
|
| We're solving slightly more than what Coolify are by providing
| Auth, analytics, event tracking, an admin dashboard and more.
| zachlatta wrote:
| I highly recommend Coolify. I evaluated every option when looking
| for a Heroku alternative, and Coolify is clearly the best as long
| as you don't absolutely require zero downtime deploys.
|
| We are hosting over 100 services on it for https://hackclub.com
| and it's been great. We're 3 months in now.
|
| The key is to think about it as a GUI on top of Docker, not as a
| fully managed solution.
|
| It's one of those PHP apps that's weirdly reliable. I see lots of
| other comments recommending Dokku / Dokploy / others. None of
| those options are nearly as mature as Coolify in my experience.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| FYI your clubs directory is down. (at least for me)
| zachlatta wrote:
| Thank you so much! Will investigate.
| samfundev wrote:
| Coolify does support zero downtime deployments, but the
| documentation isn't live yet:
| https://github.com/coollabsio/documentation-coolify/blob/640...
| cromka wrote:
| It seems to be killing all remaining connections, as it just
| stops old container when new is deemed healthy.
|
| So not completely downtime by definition, is it?
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| It is only Docker Compose that has some limitations, but
| for all other types of applications it is currently zero
| downtime, but improvements are planned in this area.
| josegonzalez wrote:
| Dokku maintainer here. What about Dokku is not as mature as
| Coolify? Would love to hear your thoughts on how the project
| falls flat for your use case.
| huesatbri wrote:
| I've been using Dokku for 7 years and counting, both
| professionally and for hobby stuff. It's a very mature project
| that has never gotten in the way, and keeps getting better.
| scottydelta wrote:
| I highly recommend coolify. Been hosting it on a dedicated server
| with 16 core and 64 GB ram and it powers following things for me
| right now
|
| - prefect for ai and other automations.
|
| - metabase
|
| - postiz
|
| - open webui
|
| - jupyter notebook
|
| - few experimental Db
|
| backup is an issue but the best way I have found is to create a
| dedicated folder for your containers volume and edit docker
| compose in coolify UI to use this path for all volumes. Now you
| can backup coolify data and this container volumes folder.
|
| You can assign a wildcard subdomain to it and it can then assign
| subdomains easily to any project with ssl. Pretty nifty.
|
| Think of coolify as ui for docker and other network things on
| server. I use lazydocker to manage containers via command line
| too on server when coolify won't bend to my will. So both
| combined together gives a solid control and ease.
| amclennon wrote:
| I have been super happy using Coolify to self host automatic
| preview branches from pull requests. I'm not sure if it's
| necessarily mature enough for me to trust it with production
| loads, but it's extremely easy to get started with the Github
| integration and wildcard subdomains
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| Thanks for using it, there will be many more features to make
| it even more production ready and stable in the future.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| I argue a "self hosted" alternative to "Heroku / Netlify /
| Vercel" is by definition not an alternative to "Heroku / Netlify
| / Vercel".
| pyb wrote:
| Not having to self-host is 80% of the point of these services
| andrasbacsai wrote:
| Hey, the dev behind Coolify here.
|
| We are working on a new UI, and to be even more mature, and a lot
| of other things, because now I am not doing this alone as I used
| to for years.
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| Yes, lots of exciting stuff coming soon.
| diamondfist25 wrote:
| Anyone use easypanel?
|
| I've been using them and it's been the easiest. They have a bunch
| of templates for open source projects, so u can click and deploy
| them easily
| morteify wrote:
| I really wanted Coolify to work, as I like the idea behind it. I
| gave it a go some time ago, and I ended up spending the entire
| evening battling issues like the proxy not running, with no
| helpful UI feedback whatsoever.
|
| So I came to the conclusion that if I have to dig through
| abstractions built by someone else, only to find out that in the
| end I have to manually restart the underlying containers anyway,
| I might as well stick to using Docker directly.
|
| And truth be told, it's not even that difficult to handle it all
| yourself. And it's definitely very educational. It gives me a
| nice feeling of being in control and knowing my server. And on
| top of that it's fun too.
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| Many stability improvements and a new UI/UX are coming soon.
| rc_kas wrote:
| This project is amazing! I been messing with it all day today,
| I'm in love.
|
| Thank you to the developers, you really have a keen eye for
| detail.
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| I am glad you like it. If you have any problems or questions,
| just let me know.
| bberenberg wrote:
| I think it's pretty good, and it's good to hear they're working
| on better deploys and UX. But the big thing to note is backups.
| There just isn't a good way to use this with critical data
| without bolting on some kind of custom backup solution. I am
| always terrified the hetzner server with all my random stuff
| will die before I get around to implementing a solution.
| peaklabs-dev wrote:
| We are also working on backups. The only big problem with
| backups for non DB Containers is that they need to be stopped
| to ensure data consistency, so we are looking at some
| filesystem level options but not sure yet.
| bberenberg wrote:
| Good luck! For what it's worth I hope you prioritize this
| above everything else.
| dboreham wrote:
| Having built similar things in the past, raising a bit of an
| eyebrow at the business model: it seems likely that with three
| parties involved (Coolify people, customer, hosting provider)
| there will end up being too much finger pointing as to the source
| of issues. Certainly way too much to cover a few dollars a month
| revenue. I think most customers would conclude they are better
| off just deploying the bare OSS version and paying whoever they
| are already paying (internal or external) for engineering
| services, to make sure it stays up.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| What's the actual point of the paid product if I still have to
| host my own stuff?
|
| Does it just manage things?
|
| Is it actually open source with usable instructions, or is it
| magic like Superbase that requires digging through GitHub issues
| to find the secret truck to getting things to work.
|
| How does it compare to Captain Rover ( which was awesome until it
| just stopped working one day, luckily my backup script captured
| my blog before this happened).
|
| At this point I'll just give Render 7$ a month.
|
| When it's 3am I don't want to figure this out by myself. In a
| Corp environment I'll let the dev ops team sort it out.
| jurajmasar wrote:
| We did a video on Coolify vs Dokploy
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1POdazLoiRE
| oldgregg wrote:
| Been running Cool for about a year. Drop a couple thousand on a
| 1U and throw it on a $100/mo colo and it's crazy bang for the
| buck. It makes it so easy to spin up new projects it's hard not
| to like it. Definitely when launching some containers and open
| source projects it's not as seamless as it could be-- can require
| fiddling with vars and compose files-- but on the whole very
| stable, lightweight, fast deploys, and conceptually pretty
| simple.
|
| One thing I've noticed is I've starting using much more open
| source software for various things. When you can just jump into
| the UI, paste in the github link, and have it running on a
| wildcard domain in 60 seconds I find myself giving OSS a try more
| often before looking elsewhere.
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