I appreciate the caution - and although they're close in spelling, I'd wager coolify is recognized by the majority as adding the suffix 'ify' to 'cool' rather than the term you've highlighted.
Wow, a nearly two decade old account, pretty cool, and still recently used too. I find a lot of old accounts simply are not used anymore, for whatever reason. I don't think pg even posts here anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I would choose Heroku or Netlify because I don't want to self host it
Why are people so afraid to self-host? It's usually cheaper and runs better than the hosted services. Get a cheap dedicated server from Hetzner, and you can run all your services there. Servers tend to keep working (usually longer than those cloud services do).
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.
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.
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.
Firstly I think it's a little impolite to frame a opensource project trying to find a sustainable funding model as "weird", whatever your concerns this is still much better than closed source.
I don't think the number of people who want to FTP stuff is very high anymore, we are all storing our code in git and therefore want to deploy on a commit or tag. We probably care about SSL, maybe we need to build our code before it can be deployed and so on.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
The core problem of most of the PaaS is the dependency on Swarm (serious workload can't be run on swarm from my experience, disaster recovery too tough).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I understand you think it is obvious and no docs are required, but it is a bit ambiguous ”you can move or clone to a separate server with a single click” and ”Full instance migration is in development but not yet released.”
Just use the Clone button on the Resources page or on the Resource Operations tab of an application - the functions are very self-explanatory, so there is no documentation yet.
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.
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.
> 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.
I mean ngrok doesn't handle all your networking pains. It is kind of a quick tool to get a public URL to localhost. But yes, it is painful to find good candidates with some computer networks / OS knowledge. We run a similar service https://pinggy.io
I think most people using Coolify know how to setup those services, it's just faster through Coolify (and, in the future, it will probably come with everything: monitoring, alerting, back-ups, etc.).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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....
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.
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.
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).
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.
I understand.
We recently made a change that makes all pages render like a SPA, so no full page reloads anymore, that said we are developing a new UI, most likely with vue.js.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
185 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadIt's good experience building the app though and good to have alternatives available.
Vercel, Netlify and Heroku will inevitably not exist in 10-20 years but Coolify will, humming along on a regular VPS.
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.
It's still there but feels like something different from what it once was.
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...
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/
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.
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?
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.
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.
Why are people so afraid to self-host? It's usually cheaper and runs better than the hosted services. Get a cheap dedicated server from Hetzner, and you can run all your services there. Servers tend to keep working (usually longer than those cloud services do).
Edit: Latest "post" (xeet?) https://mobile.x.com/heyandras/status/1901894087604916396 I could find about revenue
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.
I don't think the number of people who want to FTP stuff is very high anymore, we are all storing our code in git and therefore want to deploy on a commit or tag. We probably care about SSL, maybe we need to build our code before it can be deployed and so on.
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
Edit: just noticed you are in Finland. You might be exactly what I’ve been looking for lately
If you trust your apps enough, you don't even need chroot.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 :-)
The core problem of most of the PaaS is the dependency on Swarm (serious workload can't be run on swarm from my experience, disaster recovery too tough).
Working towards building an orchestrator.
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
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.
Just curious as the stated reason for the stated reason would become almost unnecessary with that
https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades
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.
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.
It uses docker stop once the new container is healthy with a 30 second timeout, which I believe lets existing connections drain out.
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.
It's honestly a shocker to me. There's so much knowledge about the stack that gets lost with these services.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
- Added 8 variables inside docker-compose, only 7 get recognized
- Why my docker-compose works locally and not on Coolify? Oh yeah it has its own network stuff. Then tell me beforehand!
- Error messages like "Oops something is not okay, are you okay?" 0% helpful information, 100% condescending crap
I'm not sure why this software keeps getting recommended. Even in videos like these, the guy admits its not ready yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taJlPG82Ucw&t=3126s
I do wonder though, why do we even need an alternative to Dokku when it seems to provide everything we need?
> Dokku is an extensible, open source Platform as a Service that runs on a single server of your choice. [0]
But they have a "pro" version that mentions something about "servers," plural.[1] So maybe that's the difference between regular and pro?
[0]: https://dokku.com/docs/getting-started/installation/
[1]: https://pro.dokku.com/
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.
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....
Sorry, but FYI this is my biggest pet peeve of all time.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
There's also Korifi which implements the Cloud Foundry API on Kubernetes but it's still in progress and its future might be uncertain.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43588786
We're solving slightly more than what Coolify are by providing Auth, analytics, event tracking, an admin dashboard and more.