Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

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.

>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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Question for folks who use Coolify in prod, where do you host your stuff and how much is your monthly bill?

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.

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.

Coolify has enabled me as a technical marketer to self-host with ease. Much cheaper than putting something on Railway too!

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.

Just an ad, hasn't even even been spell checked, c'mon can we stop with this

I'm starting to feel like the old man yelling at people to get off my lawn, but I don't understand why tools like this are desirable for something as critical as your infrastructure.

> Before that, I had only known pain. From renting a server, dockerizing, setting up a proxy, SSL certificates, monitoring—you name it!

Is this really so difficult? Especially in the age of docker I've never felt like deploying a new project was more straightforward. I have a handful of docker-compose files that I can copy-paste for any new project that get me spun up with a Node/Python server with LetsEncrypt SSL, optionally behind a reverse proxy. It takes me no more than 20 minutes to setup a new project which involves SSH'ing to the server, copying the files, and updating configs.

Why would I ever want to give up that level of control and reliability to saddle myself to a third party who does _magic_ to make my deployments happen? They can change their offering or their pricing at any time, and if I don't like it I now have to rip out all of their _proprietary magic_ in order to move to something more sensible.

I do think Coolify is an interesting exception as it's _self-hosted magic_, but that still leaves me with a single point of failure where I'm relying on someone else to make sure my backend keeps working. If your Coolify instance ever has a critical failure or your requirements are no longer compatible then you're right back to the same problem.

Am I out of touch? Are you really spinning up servers so frequently that this type of hard dependency is justified? Or are developers these days the ones who are out of touch (with their backend)?

I feel like Vercel needs VPS options in order to compete with Coolify.

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?

Coolify is good, I haven't found anything comparable. But it is so dumb silly in case of UX.

You switched to static container name for your release? (this turns off rolling updates) - try to find how to switch it back. I've not found.

It's complicated to understand what happened with your dockerfile build and find an error, because coolify wraps it with docker-compose dockerfile builders.

You want to move your deploy to another env? Oh, for some reason you can manage it inside deploy in Resource Operations inside deploy. You want to migrate 10 deploys? Haha, good luck.

Also I've met some problems while integrating private gitea with deploy sources for other deploys.

So, it's complicated and not just works, but there is nothing better