Tech Stacks: How we rapidly prototype new ideas without devops hurdles with Coolify

As software engineers we always have random ideas we want to test or play around with and that's a very powerful and rewarding activity that can lead to small innovations.

Our working philosophy is that we should always strive to remove any hurdles to getting a working MVP for users to test and one of the biggest hurdles is devops, getting a full infrastructure stack that just works and you can deploy on has never been easier.

We landed on using Coolify to empower our partners and devs to just focus on building software as we can self-host it and ownership of data is very important to us. For full context of how we're using Coolify so far, we have three prototypes with databases and about three full services such as Uptime Kuma running on a single server instance.

1-click apps

If you're just looking to install some services to try them or quickly set them up for a client or internal use then Coolify has you covered!

There's so many of these open source and self-hostable apps you can try out in just one click.

Databases

Coolify supports pretty much all major databases you might need on a project with a selection of common versions for each.

You're one click away for a fully provisioned remotely hosted database. By default these services are not publicly accessible, however that's also one toggle away and you can use these database for hosted apps as well as local development with persisted data.

Deploy code from Github

Now you can get into the more specific hosting environments where Coolify remains just as easy to use. You can simply connect a Github or Gitlab account or organisation as a source and then deploy apps directly from that.

You will then be greeted with some useful presets to deploy virtually any kind of modern app.

After you've chosen a base configuration, you'll then be presented with a configuration screen, some of these settings are shared between all apps and others will be app specific. Here you have all the features you can expect, source, node version, build commands, secrets, logs and more.

When you're ready to deploy you can then just press the Deploy button.

But wait there's more!

If you wanted more power or needed more features then Coolify has you covered still:

• You can deploy Docker or Docker compose files
• You can set up as many destinations as you want, so you can have one lightweight server managing Coolify and then handle all deployments on other servers
• You can have automatic deployments
• Coolify supports PR previews too
• SSL certificates are automatically handled

There's likely even more features we're missing from this list, so you will need to take this awesome tech for a spin yourself!

What we want from Coolify v4

The creator of Coolify, Andras Bacsai, is working on a new version aiming to take his already amazing software to a new level and a more business-ready application with more polish and even more features.

Here's our little wishlist for this new version:

• (sub)domain wildcard support
• more apps in the 1click (psst. where's Payload?)
• support for community plugins to add more features and integrations
• API

Of course it's hard to make these demands for free software so we'll have to see how Andras plans to monetise his software.

It's so cool!

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But really, we hope you found this useful and you get to try out Coolify. You can get in touch with us if you want more information on how we use these services or to see how we further develop our internal processes and get more insight on staying agile make sure you follow us on Twitter.