Installation - Self-hosted

To get started, you need a server, it can be a VPS, a Raspberry Pi, or any other server that you have SSH access to.

Note

It is strongly recommended to use a fresh, newly created server for installing Coolify. Installing on an existing server with other applications may lead to conflicts or unexpected behavior.

Tip

If you don’t have a server or server provider yet, we prefer to use Hetzner.

You can use our referral link. It will help us to keep the project alive.

Note

TLDR for installation:

curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash

Requirements

Supported Operating Systems

• Debian based Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.)
• Redhat based Linux distributions (CentOS, Fedora, Redhat, AlmaLinux, Rocky etc.)
• SUSE based Linux distributions (SLES, SUSE, openSUSE, etc.)
• Arch Linux
• Alpine Linux
• Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian)

Supported Architectures

• AMD64
• ARM64

Minimum Required Server

For Coolify

• 2 CPUs
• 2 GBs memory
• 30+ GB of storage for the images.

If you build on the same server and your builds are utilizing all available memory, this may cause the server to become unresponsive. To prevent this, consider enabling swap space on your server (or paying for more resources).

For Your Resources

Choosing your server resources depends on your usage. If you are planning to run a lot of things, you should consider buying a server with more resources.

Hosting Supabase, Appwrite or Posthog requires more resources than hosting a static site (waay more).

Tip

Here is an example. I’m hosting most of my production stuffs on a server with:

- 8GB of memory (average usage 3.5GB)
- 4 CPUs (average usage ~20-30%)
- 150GB disk (usage 40GB)

For the following things:

- 3 NodeJS apps
- 4 Static sites
- Plausible Analytics (for visitor analytics)
- Fider (feedback tool)
- UptimeKuma (uptime monitoring)
- Ghost (my newsletters)
- 3 Redis databases
- 2 PostgreSQL databases

Installation

Automated

This works with Docker Engine (not Docker Desktop, for that, go here) on any supported Linux distribution.

1. SSH Enabled Make sure SSH is enabled and you can connect to your server with SSH from your local machine with root user: more details here.

   Tip

   If you would like to use a custom SSH port, you can set it on the localhost server after you installed Coolify.

2. Curl Installed Make sure curl command is available on your server.

3. Install Execute the following command on your server with root user.

   curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash

   You can find the source code of this script here.

4. Open Coolify’s UI Now you can access Coolify on port http://<ip>:8000 of your server.

What it does? The script will do the following on your operating system.

• Install basic commands: curl wget git jq
• Docker Engine (24+).
• Configures proper logging for Docker Engine.
• Creates directory structure at /data/coolify for all the configuration files.
• Creates an SSH key for Coolify to be able to manage this server from itself at /data/coolify/ssh/keys/[email protected].
• Install and start dockerized Coolify.

Manually

1. SSH Enabled Make sure SSH is enabled and you can connect to your server with SSH from your local machine with root user: more details here.

2. Curl Installed Make sure curl command is available on your server.

3. Install Docker Engine (24+) Follow the official documentation to install Docker Engine on your server: Docker Engine Installation.

4. Create Directories Create the base configuration directories under /data/coolify.

   mkdir -p /data/coolify/{source,ssh,applications,databases,backups,services,proxy,webhooks-during-maintenance}
   mkdir -p /data/coolify/ssh/{keys,mux}
   mkdir -p /data/coolify/proxy/dynamic

5. Generate SSH Key Generate an SSH key for Coolify to be able to manage this server from itself.

   ssh-keygen -f /data/coolify/ssh/keys/[email protected] -t ed25519 -N '' -C root@coolify

6. Setup Your SSH Key Add your public SSH key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. This will allow Coolify to connect to this server from itself.

   cat /data/coolify/ssh/keys/[email protected] >>~/.ssh/authorized_keys
   chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

   Tip

   You can skip this step if you already have an SSH key. But you need to add this key to your Coolify instance after installation.

7. Setup Configuration Files Copy the docker-compose.yml, docker-compose.prod.yml, .env.production & upgrade.sh files from Coolify’s CDN to /data/coolify/source.

   curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/docker-compose.yml -o /data/coolify/source/docker-compose.yml
   curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/docker-compose.prod.yml -o /data/coolify/source/docker-compose.prod.yml
   curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/.env.production -o /data/coolify/source/.env
   curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/upgrade.sh -o /data/coolify/source/upgrade.sh

8. Set Permissions Set permissions for all the files and directories.

   chown -R 9999:root /data/coolify
   chmod -R 700 /data/coolify

9. Generate Values Generate values for the following variables in /data/coolify/source/.env.

   sed -i "s|APP_ID=.*|APP_ID=$(openssl rand -hex 16)|g" /data/coolify/source/.env
   sed -i "s|APP_KEY=.*|APP_KEY=base64:$(openssl rand -base64 32)|g" /data/coolify/source/.env
   sed -i "s|DB_PASSWORD=.*|DB_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand -base64 32)|g" /data/coolify/source/.env
   sed -i "s|REDIS_PASSWORD=.*|REDIS_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand -base64 32)|g" /data/coolify/source/.env
   sed -i "s|PUSHER_APP_ID=.*|PUSHER_APP_ID=$(openssl rand -hex 32)|g" /data/coolify/source/.env
   sed -i "s|PUSHER_APP_KEY=.*|PUSHER_APP_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 32)|g" /data/coolify/source/.env
   sed -i "s|PUSHER_APP_SECRET=.*|PUSHER_APP_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32)|g" /data/coolify/source/.env

   Caution

   This only needs to be done once, when you install Coolify for the first time. If you do it after Coolify has been started, it will break your installation.

   Make sure you save the values somewhere. If you lose them, you will lose access to your Coolify installation and all your data.

10. Default Docker Network Make sure the default coolify Docker network is available.

    docker network create --attachable coolify

11. Start Coolify

    docker compose --env-file /data/coolify/source/.env -f /data/coolify/source/docker-compose.yml -f /data/coolify/source/docker-compose.prod.yml up -d --pull always --remove-orphans --force-recreate

12. Open Coolify’s UI Now you can access Coolify on port http://<ip>:8000 of your server.

Docker Desktop

Caution

This is not recommended for production usage. This is only for testing purposes.

• Install Docker Desktop for Windows.
• Create a directory that will hold all your Coolify related data. For example in your User directory: C:\Users\yourusername\coolify.
• Copy docker-compose.windows.yml and .env.windows-docker-desktop.example to the directory you created in the previous step.
• Rename docker-compose.windows.yml to docker-compose.yml.
• Rename .env.windows-docker-desktop.example to .env.
• Create a coolify docker network with docker network create coolify.
• Optional: Change the values in .env file.
• Start Coolify with docker compose up command.
• You can access Coolify on port localhost:8000 of your machine.

Coolify Proxy is still not working on Windows.