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.

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.

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.

It's good experience building the app though and good to have alternatives available.

It's honestly a shocker to me. There's so much knowledge about the stack that gets lost with these services.

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

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.

Good for 1-click installs that “don’t need” a lot of maintenance, like Ghost, Plausible, etc.

Had some issues with spikes in CPU usage (similar case: https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify/issues/3226) Monitoring is not enough but I just go straight to the container im looking for and htop it.

For not 1-click I still sometimes feel like bumping into a brick wall, and go for a standalone docker-compose setup outside of coolify. Coolify is too high-level to debug small Docker intricacies (or maybe it’s that I’m bad with that).

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

There's also Korifi which implements the Cloud Foundry API on Kubernetes but it's still in progress and its future might be uncertain.

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.

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).

Great stuff, thanks for your efforts and keep up the good work !

We're solving slightly more than what Coolify are by providing Auth, analytics, event tracking, an admin dashboard and more.

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.

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

Thank you to the developers, you really have a keen eye for detail.