Deployment Plan Research

Coolify vs Dokploy

Coolify is an open-source deployment solution built with Laravel and Docker. It has run stably for years, and its deployment workflow is popular among indie developers, so I tried using Coolify for web deployment. Although Dokploy has more overall advantages than Coolify, Coolify currently has relatively weak Cloudflare support, so I chose the long-standing and stable Coolify here.

The detailed practice process is as follows:

I rented a limited-time Netcup 4C8G server. After logging in, I first copied my local macOS public key to the server.

cat ~/.ssh/filename.pub | ssh user@host "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Then set permissions on the server.

chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
ls -ld ~/.ssh
ls -l ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Configure sshd.

vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config
PermitRootLogin prohibit-password or true
PubkeyAuthentication yes

Configure and check the firewall rules required by Coolify.

sudo ufw status
sudo ufw default deny incoming
sudo ufw default allow outgoing
sudo ufw allow 22/tcp
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw allow 443/tcp
sudo ufw allow 3000/tcp
sudo ufw allow 6001/tcp
sudo ufw allow 6002/tcp
sudo ufw allow 9000:9100/tcp
sudo ufw allow 8000/tcp
sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw status verbose

Run the Coolify automated installation script.

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

After installation, use your proxy/VPN setup to access port 8000 on the server IP, then configure the Coolify account and permissions.

Actual Deployment

Create Source

Add the default source, rename it to your project name if needed, then select your private/public repository and add it through the GitHub App.

Create Project

After creating the deployment project, add resources from the source created in the previous step. For a simple Next.js project, keep the defaults, for example both base directory and public directory as root /. For a monorepo project like condev-ui, where the deployed web app lives in a subpackage, you can write nixpacks.toml to specify commands. Here the nixpacks.toml script is:

providers = ["node"][phases.setup];
nixPkgs = ["nodejs_22", "pnpm"][phases.install];
cmds = ["pnpm install --frozen-lockfile"][phases.build];
cmds = ["pnpm exec turbo run build"][start];
cmd = "pnpm --filter @condev-ui/site start";

Then push it to the repository and click project deploy. After that, you can access the deployed project through the domain. On subsequent pushes, Coolify will deploy automatically.