Installation - Self-hosted

Tip

Quick Installation (recommended):

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

For detailed setup instructions, including firewall configuration and prerequisites, see the Quick Installation Guide below.

Prerequisites

Server Requirements

You need a server with SSH access. This can be:

• A VPS
• A Dedicated Server
• A VM in Proxmox
• A Raspberry Pi (for all compatible models read the Raspberry Pi OS Setup Guide prerequisites)
• Any other server with SSH access

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.

Supported Operating Systems

• Debian based Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.)
• Redhat based Linux distributions (CentOS, Fedora, Redhat, AlmaLinux, Rocky, Asahi, etc.)
• SUSE based Linux distributions (SLES, SUSE, openSUSE, etc.)
• Arch Linux
• Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit (Raspbian)
• Alpine Linux

Supported Architectures

We only support 64-bit architectures:

• AMD64
• ARM64

Caution

For Raspberry Pi users: You must use the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian). See our Raspberry Pi OS Setup Guide for instructions.

Minimum Hardware Requirements

Server Requirements for Coolify

• 2 Core CPU
• 2 GBs memory (RAM)
• 30+ GB of storage for the images

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

Server Requirements 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 Methods

1. Quick Installation (Recommended)

1. Prepare Your Server

   • Log in as the root user (non-root user is not fully supported yet non-root-user)
   • Configure SSH by following the SSH Settings Configuration Guide
   • Configure required firewall ports using the Firewall Guide (if you are an advanced user you can have this configured differently)
   • Ensure curl is installed (pre-installed on most systems)

2. Run the Installation Script

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

   View the Scripts Source Code

   Note

   If you are not running the script as the root user, switch to the root user or use the script with sudo:

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

3. Access Coolify

   • You can find the URL of your coolify instance in the installation output.
   • It is recommended to use the PrivateIP to access coolify as it is more secure (a VPN setup to your Server is needed for that to work).

   Note

   If you installed coolify on a Raspberry Pi which is in your home network you can use the private IP address to access coolify as the public IP address will not work.

The installer does the following:

• Installs required tools (curl wget git jq openssl)
• Installs Docker Engine (27)

Caution

Docker engine installed via snap is not supported!

• Configures Docker logging
• Configures Docker daemon with default address pools
• Creates directory structure at /data/coolify
• Sets up SSH keys for server management
• Installs and starts Coolify

2. Manual Installation

For users who prefer more control over the installation process.

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.

   Caution

   Make sure to not install docker engine via snap as this is not supported!

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 first started, it will break your installation.

   Make sure you save the values somewhere that are stored in the .env file. 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.

3. Docker Desktop Installation

For local development and testing purposes only.

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.

Caution

Coolify Proxy is still not working on Windows.

Debugging

Expired GitHub Personal Access Token

You might encounter one of these errors:

Error response from daemon: Head "https://ghcr.io/v2/coollabsio/coolify-helper/manifests/1.0.1": unauthorized: authentication required

or

Unable to find image 'ghcr.io/coollabsio/coolify-helper:latest' locally
docker: Error response from daemon: Head "https://ghcr.io/v2/coollabsio/coolify-helper/manifests/latest": denied: denied

These errors indicate that Docker cannot authenticate with the GitHub Container Registry (ghcr.io). To resolve this, you can either:

1. Log out of the GitHub Container Registry (ghcr.io):

docker logout ghcr.io

2. Or renew your GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) if you need to maintain authenticated access for deployments for example.

Raspberry Pi Crashes

If you are using a Raspberry Pi with only 2GB of RAM, you may experience system crashes even with swap space enabled. This probably occurs because Raspberry PIs often use SD cards which are slower than SSDs and can be unstable.

The solution is to either:

• Upgrade to a modern Raspberry Pi with 4GB+ of RAM, or
• Limit Docker’s memory usage by adding the following to your /etc/docker/daemon.json file:

{
  "memory": "1.8g"
}