You can run Coolify on your local machine (like old laptop/Raspberry PI) and expose it to the internet without opening any ports on your router with Cloudflare Tunnels.

For more details about CF Tunnels, please visit this page.

Setup Cloudflared

You have at least two ways to setup Cloudflare Tunnels with Coolify.

Automated

1

Setup Tunnels on Cloudflare

  1. Go to https://one.dash.cloudflare.com/.

  2. Select your account.

  3. Open Networks-> Tunnels-> Create a Tunnel

  4. Connector: Cloudflared connector

  5. Choose any name you like. notice

  6. Copy your Cloudflare Tunnel Token from any of the commands.

The token starts with eyJ....

token

  1. On the Route Tunnel tab, add the following tunnels:

You can use any domains/subdomains. This will make sure you can reach your server through Cloudflare Tunnels.

ssh

2

Setup Tunnels on Coolify

  1. Add a new server with your server’s IP Address - it will be reconfigured later on. addserver

  2. Validate the server.

  3. After the server is validated, click on Configure in the Cloudflare Tunnels section.

  4. Paste Cloudflare Tunnel Token from the previous step and set the SSH Domain to the domain you set in the previous step. setcftoken

Manual

WIP

Setup Resources in Coolify

You have several options to use Cloudflare Tunnels with Coolify.

  1. One domain -> One resource.
  2. Wildcard subdomain -> All resources.

One domain -> One resource

In this case, you need to add a public domain every time you would like to expose a new resource through Cloudflare Tunnels.

You can stop Coolify Proxy and set it to None, it is not needed in this case.

  1. Go to your tunnel settings on Cloudflare. (https://one.dash.cloudflare.com/ -> Networks -> Tunnels -> Select your tunnel)
  2. Switch to Public Hostname tab.
  3. Add a new Public Hostname. onepublic
  4. Go to Coolify and to your resource settings: - Remove any Domains settings. - Set Port Mappings to the same port that you set in the Public Hostname settings.

    As an example, I’m deploying a static site, that listens in port 80 inside the container and I’m mapping it to the port 8888 on the host. So, I need to set the Port Mappings to 8888:80. portmappings

  5. Deploy & enjoy.

Wildcard subdomain -> All resources

In this case, you only need to setup a wildcard domain once and you can expose all your resources through it.

You will need to use Coolify's Proxy to route the traffic to the correct resource.

  1. Go to your tunnel settings on Cloudflare. (https://one.dash.cloudflare.com/ -> Networks -> Tunnels -> Select your tunnel)
  2. Switch to Public Hostname tab.
  3. Add a new wildcard Public Hostname. wildcard-cf
  4. In Cloudflare go to Networks -> Tunnels and click on your tunnel name. From the sidebar copy the Tunnel ID. cf-tunnel-id
  5. In Cloudflare go to your DNS settings and add a new CNAME record with the following settings:
    • Name: *
    • Target: <Tunnel ID>.cfargotunnel.com
    • TTL: Auto
  6. Go to Coolify and to your resource settings.

Set the Domains to any subdomain of the wildcard domain you set in the previous step.

wildcard-coolify

You need to use http:// in the Domains settings. Cloudflare will take care of the https part. For this you need to set SSL/TLS to Full in the SSL/TLS menu on Cloudflare. ssl-full

  1. Deploy & enjoy.

If you would like to add a new resource, you only need to do point 6 and 7.

Post Setup

After everything is setup, you can fully disable direct access to your server by disabling all the ports (except SSH (port:22 by default)) on your firewall.

Setup self-hosted Coolify

You can use the one domain without Coolify Proxy or wildcard setup with Coolify Proxy to expose your self-hosted Coolify instance to the internet.

With the wildcard setup, you have nothing to do.

With the one domain setup, you need a bit more setup with Coolify to make it work.

Let’s say you configured the following Public Hostnames in Cloudflare:

  • app.coolify.io mapped to localhost:8000
  • realtime.coolify.io mapped to localhost:6001

After you installed Coolify, you need to add 3 lines your .env file, located in /data/coolify/source folder.

APP_ID=<random string>
APP_KEY=<random string>
APP_NAME=Coolify
DB_PASSWORD=<random string>
PUSHER_APP_ID=<random string>
PUSHER_APP_KEY=<random string>
PUSHER_APP_SECRET=<random string>
REDIS_PASSWORD=<random string>

###########
# Add these lines
PUSHER_HOST=realtime.coolify.io
PUSHER_PORT=443
###########

This tells Coolify how to connect to it’s realtime server through Cloudflare Tunnels.

Restart Coolify with the installation script.

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

If you have a firewall, you also need to allow the following ports.

Verify

  1. Navigate to your Coolify instance, as in the example: https://app.coolify.io.
  2. Login with the root user (the first user you created after installation).
  3. Open another tab/window and navigate to https://app.coolify.io/realtime. On the other tab (opened in point 2), you should see a notification about the test event.
  4. If you know what are you doing, you can check the network tab as well. Search for a websocket connection.