To get started, you need a server, it can be a VPS, a Raspberry Pi, or any other server that you have SSH access to.
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.
If you don’t have a server or server provider yet, we prefer to use Hetzner.You can use our referral link. It will helps us to keep the project alive.
TLDR for installation:
curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash

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Requirements

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Supported Operating Systems

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

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Supported Architectures

  • AMD64
  • ARM64

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Minimum Required Server

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For Coolify

  • 2 CPUs
  • 2 GBs memory
  • 30+ GB of storage for the images.

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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).
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

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Installation

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Automated

This works with Docker Engine (not Docker Desktop, for that, go here) on any supported Linux distribution.
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.
If you would like to use a custom SSH port, you can set it on the localhost server after you installed Coolify.
2

Curl Installed

Make sure curl command is available on your server.
3

Install

Execute the following command on your server with root user.
curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash
You can find the source code of this script here.
4

Open Coolify's UI

Now you can access Coolify on port http://<ip>:8000 of your server.
What it does? The script will do the following on your operating system.
  • Install basic commands: curl wget git jq
  • Docker Engine (24+).
  • Configures proper logging for Docker Engine.
  • Creates directory structure at /data/coolify for all the configuration files.
  • Creates an SSH key for Coolify to be able to manage this server from itself at /data/coolify/ssh/keys/id.root@host.docker.internal.
  • Install and start dockerized Coolify.

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Manually

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.
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/id.root@host.docker.internal -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/id.root@host.docker.internal.pub >>~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
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
This only needs to be done once, when you install Coolify for the first time. If you do it after Coolify has been started, it will break your installation.Make sure you save the values somewhere. 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.

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Docker Desktop

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.
Coolify Proxy is still not working on Windows.