Coolify hosting - final thoughts

As described in part 1 and part 2 Coolify has quite some things to offer. On the other hand it is still in beta and there are a lot of moving parts and breakages here and there. The stability likely will settle once an RC or the GA version is available. I did not look at v3 as it's likely not maintained anymore because the maintainer fully concentrates on v4 which is a complete rewrite (JS->PHP).

This brings me to an important point. Up until now Andras is the only maintainer of this project. There are some helping hand from the community but the main part of developing new features and fixing more trick bugs is resting on his shoulders. But on the other hand with Dokku it's almost the same. There is one main developer handling almost everything and also did rewrite parts of Dokku in Go. This is not necessarily a problem as long as the motivation or sustainability lasts. Dokku has besides sponsorships also a commercial UI to offer. Coolify has the "control pane" as a SaaS offer besides also taking sponsorships.

Besides this I noticed while looking at the code that there are no tests added and the platform itself is quite complex. This might lead to more bugs over time especially if more community might join development. I'm not sure though if this is desired by the maintainer at all as it will bring in other parts likely more challenging.

Overall this project is nonetheless very promising and if hardened and stabilized might serve teams and individuals good service. As with all complex software it comes at the cost of "magic" or "if it runs it's good" vibes. I for example changed the proxy and restarted it. Then everything was down. I was completely confused as I did not change anything and investigating was quite a challenge if you don't know anything really about the architecture. The solution to this problem was to disable the firewall and login via http. The proxy was not running and also a server restart did not launch it.

Another thing that might get better with the help and contributions of the community is the documentation and knowledge base. At such a fast pace this is outdating quickly or not present at all for some of the features. I will for now keep it running in parallel to my known and stable Dokku setup.