Kamal has a lot of rough edges (still can’t support custom certs for example) but is still a far more mature solution. It does less but better.

Kamal proxy is good enough to sit behind a load balancer. I would not let it be what a client sees. There are some major features missing and it just hasn’t been battle tested enough to be subjected to DDoS type traffic, etc.

Overall, I do like the Kamal approach which basically boils down to the fact that instead of a complicated cluster orchestration system the developers decide which machines code runs on.

Once it has real support for doing DB migrations as a part of its deploys, a proxy that is less magical and more feature rich, and its CLI fixes some poorly documented and frankly somewhat annoying issues it will be a real workhorse.

I am also curious about Dokku + k3s. I have used Dokku for a long time but only on a single host.

What’s your use case for custom certs? Why are the automatically issued Let’s Encrypt ones not enough?

Had the exact same experience. Incredibly clunky UI/UX.

For docker-compose, I had to create a specific one for Coolify because it goes and does its own magic.

Tried Dokploy(similar service), better UI but lacking in docs.

In the right hands, these products could be so much better.

Dokploy unfortunately isn’t nearly as mature as Coolify.

That is true, Coolify supports magic variables to make your life easier by automatically creating values like passwords and URLs, but you are not forced to use them, it is just there to make your life easier, some improvements to the naming and docs for the magic vars are planned.

Those "magic variables" have caused more pain than being helpful.

- Added 8 variables inside docker-compose, only 7 get recognized

- Why my docker-compose works locally and not on Coolify? Oh yeah it has its own network stuff. Then tell me beforehand!

- Error messages like "Oops something is not okay, are you okay?" 0% helpful information, 100% condescending crap

I'm not sure why this software keeps getting recommended. Even in videos like these, the guy admits its not ready yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taJlPG82Ucw&t=3126s

I totally understand, thanks for the feedback. We have a lot of stability improvements planned, especially for deployments (announcement soon).

Dokploy is not open-source. Broken license.

Thanks for sharing this. I was thinking of giving it a try, but hearing that zero downtime deployments don't work is a deal breaker for me, which is sad because Coolify looks amazing otherwise.

I do wonder though, why do we even need an alternative to Dokku when it seems to provide everything we need?

I had thought Dokku was only for a single host(?) From their docs:

> Dokku is an extensible, open source Platform as a Service that runs on a single server of your choice. [0]

But they have a "pro" version that mentions something about "servers," plural.[1] So maybe that's the difference between regular and pro?

[0]: https://dokku.com/docs/getting-started/installation/

[1]: https://pro.dokku.com/

It's multiple host via our k3s integration.

I tried it too, but gave up quickly.

If you don't have issues with CLI tools, you're better off with stuff like Ansible, Salt, Chef, Puppet, Nix, Guix, etc. Deploy LGTM or SigNoz alongside your apps and you're good to go.

Nix is used for app deployments?

Nothing stops people from using it that way.

I would kind of prefer appimages / flatpak's though ?

I think appimages are the best way if we can get aside from the fact of some limitiations it has if I remember like if you build the project on X then code can only run on linux versions on Y where there is some relation b/w X and Y , I know its very vague... It was some reddit post.

Man , I have watched / read so many posts that I only vaguely remember things but I really don't have exact bookmarks and it just feels so repetitive and kind of humiliating to say these again and again....

If you are using Nixpacks, then yes it is used to build you docker image.

FYI that I did a bounty for database SSL connections and they implemented it, so they should be live now!

There's no "that" after FYI. It's "For your information, <foo>"

Sorry, but FYI this is my biggest pet peeve of all time.

Understandable , have a nice day.

Coolify does support zero downtime deployments, but the documentation isn't live yet: https://github.com/coollabsio/documentation-coolify/blob/640...

Is this new? I tested it back in October 2024 and it didn't work.

I set up an app that would take a couple of seconds to return a request. Started a long benchmark and did a deploy. Got some errors right after deploying because the pending requests were killed.

SSL support for DBs was added in a recent release.

A new UI is planned and under development as we speak.

Improvements to zero downtime deployments and our overall deployment flow, including scaling across multiple servers, are under planning and will be released later this year.

After trying coolify I went to dokploy which makes more sense to me and doesn't have any upsells

What upsells does Coolify have? All features are completely free and the Cloud version is exactly the same as the self-hosted one.