Journey of Self-Hosting (4): Coolify

After the previous post (Journey of Self-Hosting (3): Get your cloud server, for free) you should have your server running and ready to run some actually useful stuff.

You might be thinking that: I just need to install Docker, and install everything I want with Docker and somehow things will work eternally.

Actually, we can do more than that. There are really cool projects out there that can make your head-start in this journey much easier.

Coolify: An open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify / Vercel alternative

For those of you who don't have experience with Heroku and alike, they are PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) companies. They take care of the low-level nitty-gritty details of cloud infrastructure (i.e. networking, containers, etc.) and what you need to do as a customer is just to provide them with your project code, and they will automate the deployment of it to the cloud as much as possible.

For example, say you want a PostgreSQL database. If you are dealing with the infrastructure yourself, you have to worry about the Docker setup, which image to use, networking, security, etc. On the other hand, in a PaaS platform, you might be just one click away from a running database that is ready to be connected.

You can read documentation from Heroku to learn more.

And, Coolify, is an open-source and self-hostable software that can turn your server into a PaaS.

I don't feel like doing a whole tutorial on Coolify here because someone has already done a very good job:

Basically, it offers a big list of benefits including but not limited to:

Easy installation. Just one line of curl and bash away.
One-click deployment of popular self-hosted software like Ghost (the one you are reading now!), Vaultwarden, etc.
Easy deployment of any software with Docker or Git repositories.
Free SSL so that you don't need to figure out how to go from http to https.
Automatic DB backups. This includes your configs of the Coolify instance, and also the databases you provision using Coolify!
- Despite backups on local disk, you can even have S3 storage as a destination of remote backups.
Great integrations with notification tools like Email, Telegram, etc.

Conclusion

I have been running Coolify on my remote server as a PaaS and never looked back. After having dozens of apps running with it, it's proven to be pretty solid. And the author is putting much effort into maintaining it too. I can't wait to see even more great features coming.