Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal
blog.api-fiddle.com
blog.api-fiddle.com
I personally blame the "growth at all costs" that is pervasive to tech industry, where "simply" being an established, moderately profitable, healthy company is seen as negative. It brings along all sorts of perverse incentives.
High power level take.
The Stallman ethos of Free Software simply hasn't played out the way idealists thought it would. Instead, libraries are standardized by megacorps to farm employees inculcated into their design patterns and get GitHub clout chasers to fix bugs for free.
Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND* license. Code is open but you can't profit from it. Unmodified redistribution requires credit. You can modify the code for personal use but you can't redistribute it without permission.
This model at least eliminates the potential maliciousness of a lot of closed-source software while leaving room for indie devs to profit from their work.
The flexibility of the licensing text is also nice as it'd be very easy to modify the standard "two years to open source" timetable or drop in a different license type like GPL:
https://github.com/keygen-sh/fcl.dev/blob/master/FCL-1.0-MIT...
I’m very much torn, because on the one hand, I can attribute my entire career to OSS. I learned from using and studying others’ work. OTOH, what I did not do is take someone’s work, and monetize it.
I have no issue with using a library; those are nearly always released with the explicit purpose of being included in a larger body of work. But if someone makes a full product, and releases it under essentially any OSI-approved license, absolutely nothing stops me from taking it as-is, throwing a splashy page in front of it, and making money (assuming it’s a marketable product, of course). This to me is the same as stumbling across an artisan making a product and selling it cheaply, only to turn around and immediately resell it for a profit, simply because they didn’t know any better. It’s legal, but it’s ethically gross.
Only with users who access the service.
That seems akin to saying "vegan food really needs pork", since by definition a NC licence can't be open source. Not to mention such licences cause as many, if not more, problems than they solve.
https://community.oscedays.org/t/why-are-non-commercial-lice...
As such “by definition a NC license can’t be open source” is true only by certain definitions. Open source is a generic term, not owned by the OSI, despite the holy wars fought over it.
I realize my post is controversial and may spur vitriol from some. It is an uncomfortable truth for many.
With Coolify it's different, because many companies are willing to sponsor the project, so it's already sustainable.
Maybe it could be done with better abstractions today but I just don't think it's worth all the complexity that it seems to come with nowadays.
Make Web Pages Reload Again.
This worries me about the state of Github more than anything else. For the past couple years now we've been seeing these "viral" repos that catch on for one reason or another, get tens of thousands of stars in a few months (in part due to posts like this), and then languish. Time was that a few thousand Github stars really meant something; that a project had steadily gained support over years and was at a place that was production ready for the masses. Not so anymore.
GH stars of Coolify built over 4 years.
That's kind of my point. It's becoming impossible now to tell the difference between long running stable repos vs something someone with social media followers just started pushing by stars alone anymore.
... as is included in the article (vs Dokku), FWIW.
https://blog.api-fiddle.com/post-media/0008-graph.png per https://star-history.com
That is not how I understood the chart in the article (vs Dokku), 2024 hockey stick!
> What happened next with Next.js and Vercel is far less magical...
What happened - could someone elaborate or share a link?
Found this discussion - perhaps related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40682711 “Vercel ends open-source sponsorship program giving projects 24hr notice”
CapRover still has a few things that it does better (better custom-domain support, more 1-click apps, integrated NetData monitoring, etc.), but overall Coolify is a lot more beginner-friendly and simpler to use.
Once I forgot my password to the admin panel and it just wasn't that big of deal to blow away the VPS and set it all up from scratch. Feels good to not be anxious about that.
The hard thing about adopting a product like yours is that as a potential customer you never know whether the thing you want to do is actually going to be easy or hard or impossible or time consuming.
The home page preaches all the right things, but it's very busy and information dense and yet nothing on the home page gives me enough detail for me to know if it will actually work for me for real.
Figuring out whether a product like this will actually work for me is the real cost I'm looking at, not the $10/month cost. At present, the figuring out if it will work for me cost looks arbitrarily high, because I have no information to go on on the home page without trying to work through an actual deployment on my own.
The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool. It needs to focus instead on explaining things. Adding words, either spoken or on title cards, would help significantly. Yes, I understand there are words in the video - they are words that talk about goals of your company, not words that tell me what is going on in the video. I see lots of things that I recognize or that make sense, but I don't know where it's going or what I'm watching when it starts, so I have no schema in my mind to organize what I'm watching. Getting rid of the "music," or replacing it with much less distracting audio, would help as well - it makes it much harder to concentrate on trying to understand what I'm seeing. Remember, I am watching the video with the goal of understanding "will this do the specific things I need it to do" not "do we agree on the high level goals of what would be great to have."
Coolify is winning today, not because its tech is better than competitors, but because it's tech is more understandable than competitors.
> The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool
I have been working on a Loom version. Before putting a lot of time into the demo, I wanted to validate that people were watching it (and they are). I quickly put something together in iMovie that would introduce the product in <1 minute, was not trying to be cool. It stings to hear, but I accept that was the vibe.
> it's very busy and information dense ... nothing on the home page gives me enough detail
It has ~the same number of words as Render/Coolify/Vercel, so I will take your point that I'm not yet telling the story as well.
Not at the moment unfortunately. I understand it's more friction, but you can just clone any of those repos and deploy them to FlexStack in 1-click by linking your GitHub account.
Coolify is awesome software, and alongside similar tools like Caprover, Dokku, and Cloud66, it has its role. But for business use-cases I believe that giving up managed cloud services is too big a leap to make sense, and that a middle-ground approach will win in the long term.
I've used neither solution, but just at a glance, right now I'd bet on Coolify -- it has more permissive license, it has active community of third party contributors and it amassed a large amount of private and corporate sponsors that likely make it sustainable.
On the other hand, you've raised $3.9m more that a year ago. What happens if the money runs out?
Maybe you can clarify what your solution offers that Coolify doesn't.
Coolify and cnc are very different technical solutions. Coolify is a server you deploy to a VM that then can schedule workloads onto that VM, managing features like ingress and updates. cnc is a client-side CLI that schedules workloads into managed cloud services like lambda, cloud run, ECS, or Kubernetes. It orchestrates public cloud provided services instead of providing them itself (e.g. RDS vs. MySQL in a docker container on a VM). The trade-offs here are too big for a comment and both are a great fit for different use cases. We dive in a bit deeper with our POV here: https://www.withcoherence.com/post/the-2024-web-hosting-repo...
What makes Coolify so useful?
It's never taken me more than 30 minutes to deploy self-hosted tools, from Nextcloud to Prosody, even without Docker. These "serverless" platforms certainly aren't any cheaper than bare metal and are at best marginally quicker to deploy, so what makes Coolify so useful to you?
Is it easier to maintain, manage dependencies, or load balance over time? What am I missing?
Outside that I deploy apps outside coolify as it doesn't scale automatically.
Solutions like Coolify help to save more than 30 minutes.
I have recorded a sample of my own herokulikeinspiredbycoolifysuccesssaas where I deploy a WordPress instance (with MySQL and ability to enable backups with 1 click) in less than 3 minutes, including introduction, explanations and afterword.
Having the right app template allows to easily spin any number of services you need in an ultra-short time.
Mine is based on the Docker Swarm, so you're getting the proven solution under the hood.
Mine is located here: https://ptah.sh
Idea is the same as with Coolify, but a little bit more opinionated and built solely on Docker Swarm.
30 minutes honestly sounds like a long time compared to the time it takes to do this with a PaaS.
Some other stuff that's nice: multiple environments (staging, production, you name it), Multiple deploy targets if you're running many servers (via Docker Swarm), support for Teams (in case you need multiple people to handle something, update environment variables, etc). There's lots.
Maybe you should give it a whirl? I don't know your exact use-cases
> Before that, I had only known pain. From renting a server, dockerizing, setting up a proxy, SSL certificates, monitoring—you name it!
Is this really so difficult? Especially in the age of docker I've never felt like deploying a new project was more straightforward. I have a handful of docker-compose files that I can copy-paste for any new project that get me spun up with a Node/Python server with LetsEncrypt SSL, optionally behind a reverse proxy. It takes me no more than 20 minutes to setup a new project which involves SSH'ing to the server, copying the files, and updating configs.
Why would I ever want to give up that level of control and reliability to saddle myself to a third party who does _magic_ to make my deployments happen? They can change their offering or their pricing at any time, and if I don't like it I now have to rip out all of their _proprietary magic_ in order to move to something more sensible.
I do think Coolify is an interesting exception as it's _self-hosted magic_, but that still leaves me with a single point of failure where I'm relying on someone else to make sure my backend keeps working. If your Coolify instance ever has a critical failure or your requirements are no longer compatible then you're right back to the same problem.
Am I out of touch? Are you really spinning up servers so frequently that this type of hard dependency is justified? Or are developers these days the ones who are out of touch (with their backend)?
Tools like Coolify streamline this process and give you a preconfigured template to get everything wired up from a git repository push event to a deployment on a docker-swarm cluster, with a shiny UI to configure env variables and check the terminal output of the container etc
I'm not sure what you'd consider magic here though, it's mostly just quality of life templates and a coherent UI so you don't have to execute various commands via ssh
im banned from heztner because my card expired and i coudnt pay invoice, can i register as a company?
You switched to static container name for your release? (this turns off rolling updates) - try to find how to switch it back. I've not found.
It's complicated to understand what happened with your dockerfile build and find an error, because coolify wraps it with docker-compose dockerfile builders.
You want to move your deploy to another env? Oh, for some reason you can manage it inside deploy in Resource Operations inside deploy. You want to migrate 10 deploys? Haha, good luck.
Also I've met some problems while integrating private gitea with deploy sources for other deploys.
So, it's complicated and not just works, but there is nothing better