I really wanted Coolify to work, as I like the idea behind it. I gave it a go some time ago, and I ended up spending the entire evening battling issues like the proxy not running, with no helpful UI feedback whatsoever.

So I came to the conclusion that if I have to dig through abstractions built by someone else, only to find out that in the end I have to manually restart the underlying containers anyway, I might as well stick to using Docker directly.

And truth be told, it’s not even that difficult to handle it all yourself. And it’s definitely very educational. It gives me a nice feeling of being in control and knowing my server. And on top of that it’s fun too.