Mooving away from Coolify
At Bixoto we have a lot of apps deployed using Dokku and we are very happy with it. However, for some complex apps we would like to be able to use docker-compose.yml files, but Dokku doesn’t support them.
Back in February, we deployed a Coolify instance on a new server. Coolify looked like a good solution for a Dokku-like server with a web interface and support for docker-compose.yml deployments, as well as more features not supported by Dokku, like the ability to manage more than one node from the interface.
Unfortunately, we quickly had issues with it, but more importantly we found that issues were very hard to debug because Coolify is based on the promise that everything “magically” works and so doesn’t give you the instruments to troubleshoot it when things go wrong. The error messages are cryptic and at that time there was no CLI tool for it (they released a stable one only two weeks ago). It was a very frustrating experience compared to Dokku.
After a lot of time spent troubleshooting it we decided we were done with it and migrated the apps away. The new setup is not perfect: it’s just a bunch of apps deployed using docker compose, but at least there’s no “magic” abstraction around it and it’s easy to troubleshoot issues.
This experience doesn’t mean Coolify is bad or that we won’t reconsider it in the future. I personally started using Dokku in 2014 and at that time it was not as smooth as now and after a few years I switched to Flynn (now dead), before switching back to Dokku when it was more mature.
