While reading Robb Knight’s post about setting up GoToSocial in Coolify, I got curious as to what this Coolify project actually is. I’m a happy user of Dokku, but being one with magpie tendencies, plus always on the lookout for ways to make the little apps I make for myself easier to deploy, I thought I’d check it out.

So I spun up a Coolify instance on a new Hetzner server this morning and tried deploying a simple Go app, complete with automatic deployments when I push changes to a Forgejo repository. And yeah, I must say it works pretty well. I haven’t done anything super sophisticated, such as setting up a database or anything. But it’s almost as easy as deploying something with Dokku, and I’m please that I was able get it working with my Forgejo setup¹.

Anyway, this post is just a few things I want to make a note about for next time I want to setup a Coolify instance. It’s far from a comprehensive set-up guide: there’s plenty of documentation on the project website. But here are a few things I’d like to remember.

Changing the Proxy to Caddy: Soon after setting up your Coolify instance, you probably want to change the proxy to Caddy, just so that you can easily get Lets Encrypt certificates. Do this before you setup a domain as you’ll need direct access to Coolify via the port.

Go to “Servers → localhost” and in the “Proxy” tab, stop the current proxy. You then have the option of changing it to Caddy.

Setting Up a Domain For Coolify Itself: Once you’ve change the proxy, you’d probably want to setup a domain so as to avoid accessing it via IP address and port number. You can do so by going to “Settings,” and within “Instance Settings” changing “Domain”.

If you prepend your domain with https, a certificate will be setup for you. I’m guessing it’s using Lets Encrypt for this, which is fine. I’d probably do likewise if I had to set it up manually.

Deploying From a Private Forgejo Repository: To deploy from a private Forgejo repository, follow the Gitea integration instructions on setting up a private key. This is basically creating a new key in “Keys And Tokens”, and adding it as a key in Forgejo.

As far as I’m aware, it’s not possible to change an application source from a public Git repo to a private one. I tried that and I got a few deploy errors, most likely because I didn’t set the key. I had to delete it and start from scratch.

Setting a Domain For a Project: Setting up a domain is pretty simple: just add a new A record pointing to the IP address of the service the application is running on. Much like the Coolify domain, prefacing your domain with https will provision a TLS certificate for you (docs):

Unlike Dokku, your app doesn’t need to support the PORT environment variable. You should be able to start listening on a port and simply setup a mapping in the project page. The default seems to be port 3000, just in case you’re not interested in changing it:

Automatic Deployments From Forgejo: Coolio looks to have some nice integrations with Github, but that doesn’t help me and my use of Forgejo. So the setup is a little more manual: adding some web-hook to automatically deploy when pushing commits to Forgejo. In Coolify, you’d want to use the Gittea web-hook:

You’ll need to generate the web-hook secret yourself. Running head -c 64 /dev/urandom | base64 or similar should give you something somewhat secure.

Setting up the web-hook on Forgejo’s side was a little confusing. Clicking “Add Webhook” just brought up a list of integrations, which I’m guessing are geared towards particular form of web-hook payloads. You want to select the “Forgejo” one.

Use the URL that Coolify is showing for the Gittea web-hook, leave the method as “POST” and set the secret you generated. The rest you can configure based on your preferences.

So that it. So far I’m liking it quite a bit, and I look forward to going a bit further than simple Go apps that serve a static message (some of the pre-canned applications look interesting). I’d like to try it for a bit longer before I consider it as a replacement for Dokku, but I suspect that may eventually happen.