Hey all !

A bit of context first.

I'm an independent web developper, building software primarily with Svelte and Symfony, directus and Postgresql for small clients or for personal side projects. I've been in the industry for 8 years. I'm not a devops but I've been dabbling in docker containers and I'm feeling comfortable with them (I built my own server at home from sratch with 50-ish containers in order to have my own cloud with *arr stack, music and video streaming, documents and photo cloud, ...).

I used to deploy the apps I build on Heroku, then on Netlify. But when it started to get pricier or when I needed to do some custom stuff that the platform wouldn't let me, I migrated to a self hosted coolify instance.

I'm more than happy with it, and have little to no complaints.

But I'm a tinkerer at my core, and wondered if I could replicate the features of Coolify by smooshing together a bunch of services and softwares. Here's my train of thoughts, and the justifications of a madman.

Why ?

[I'm] preoccupied with whether or not [I] could that [I] didn't stop to think if [I] should.

I think it's a good reason.

If it's not enough, then it's also to learn how it works inside it, to better understand the limitations and the fixes when something breaks.

Finally, because I don't like being tied to a unique service, a one-size-fits-all, a single point of failure. I always like having backup plans, if a service I'm using enshittifies itself or becomes incompatible with the rest of my stack or whatever.

What features ?

If I strip Coolify and any PaaS to its basics, it's a way to deploy automatically services to servers with the help of docker containers. There's a big main server, where the PaaS instance is hosted, that manages other small servers, where the final and client facing apps are hosted. In the case of Coolify, you can chose to deploy known apps and services, like Supabase. And when it needs an update, you only need to edit the docker compose to the latest numbered version and click redeploy. Or if you're here for the thrills you set the version to latest and look forward the breaking changes. You can also deploy your own app from a git instance and each time you push changes on a specific branch it triggers a CI/CD to deploy automatically the latest version. Neat. There's a project and environment management, that lets you organize services by clients and prod, demo, testing env. On top of all that, there's a reverse proxy to help with domain name and redirecting requests to the correct docker service.

Another feature from Coolify that I'm using is their automated database backups to S3 compatible storage.

How ?

I'm thinking of a stack around Arcane, Backrest and Swag.

Arcane here is the main thing. It would allow me to replicate the Coolify servers management, with one main orchestration/monitoring server and as many endpoints as I need. There's an option to automatically update images of services. I could use it as part of the CI/CD : everytime a release of my websites is done, a docker image is created and Arcane pulls it.

Backrest would be useful for the database backup into a S3 service. I'd still need something like a cron to execute a pg_dump every now and then. But that should not be hard to do/find somewhere.

I am already familiar with Swag with my home server. I've been using it for 4 or 5 years and pretty happy with it. The mods let me plug useful security softwares :

• Crowdsec for requests abuses and CVE, bot trapping
• max-mind for the geoblocking

Preconfigured fail2ban, working in concert with crowdsec, and certbot for automated ssl certs are also nice to have.

Ansible would help me deploy all of those into a fresh VPS.

What do you think of it ? Is there something missing ? Is this something you would do or go easy with the all-in-one Coolify solution ?