Set up your Heroku for free
Set up your Heroku for free
At Solvro, we had an issue where deploying every application required pulling in a whole team of DevOps. Any change required server intervention, accessing via ssh, changing configurations, and setting automatic deployments, which were weekly tasks, and nobody wanted to do them.
That's why we started looking for alternatives, and a few options caught our eye, such as:
- Coolify
- Caprover
- Dokku
- Portainer
After a quick evaluation of each, we decided to choose Coolify, and why?
An Abundance of Features
Among all these solutions, it's Coolify that impresses with the sheer volume of possibilities and configurations. It supports several projects on one instance, multiple teams, and is actively developed by Andras (now up to the 4th version!).
Synchronization with Github
You probably know this from other paid solutions like Vercel or Netlify, where whatever you push to your repository immediately deploys your app. Coolify does that too! In fact, it allows you to deploy public repositories, private ones, just the Dockerfile, or docker compose. It also supports something called preview deployments, where on every PR in your repo, a nice comment is created with a link to the version that was just deployed (and will be cleaned up after the PR is closed).
Databases
You probably know how much hassle goes into properly configuring a database along with backups. If not, you'll find out XD. For example, I never want to create backups, set replicas, block ports, etc. Surprise, Coolify has it built-in and even supports quite a few databases:
And besides supporting these databases, it also offers backups for them (backed up to S3!)
Ready-to-Use Applications
But often when making applications, you need to use ready-made services; nobody these days writes full-text search from scratch; instead, they use ready-made solutions like Meilisearch. Coolify has over 155 ready templates for various applications, and I think everyone will find something for themselves because there's a lot to choose from (this is just a small fragment).
Notifications
If someone has ever self-hosted applications, they know that many things can go wrong, the disk might fill up, the build might crash along the way, or the app for some reason might crash and not restart. In such moments, Coolify has our back and sends us notifications on Discord, email, or Telegram!
How to Install?
Installing Coolify is its strong point because it is ridiculously simple. You just need to paste a single command into your server's terminal, and everything is done automatically, except for connecting the domain, which you have to do on your own. More information can be found here https://coolify.io/docs/installation
Help
If someone is interested in trying out this approach, we encourage you to contact us. We would gladly help with the implementation of Coolify in your club or organization :) here's the contact link https://solvro.pwr.edu.pl/en/contact
