Coolify self-hosted on a Cloud VPS: requirements, ports and install

Minimum hardware and supported systems

Coolify's installation guide sets the floor at 2 CPU cores, 2 GB of RAM and 10 GB of free disk on amd64 or arm64. That covers the control plane itself. Everything you deploy, and every image Coolify builds, sits on top of it.

The docs say a 1 core, 512 MB box can run it but is not recommended, and that builds plus Coolify on one server can make it unresponsive under load. On Ubuntu they ask for an LTS release (20.04, 22.04 or 24.04); non-LTS releases go through the manual install. Red Hat family systems may need Docker installed first on some variants. The guide also recommends a fresh server, so nothing else is already bound to the ports Coolify wants.

Mapping the minimum onto VPS flavors

Our Cloud VPS flavors run as KVM guests on OpenStack hosts in New York. Read against the official floor, the 1 GB and 2 GB flavors have a single vCPU, so they sit below the 2-core minimum. The 4 GB flavor (2 vCPUs, 80 GB SSD) is the first one that meets it on every line, and the 8 GB flavor (4 vCPUs, 160 GB SSD) leaves room to build images on the same machine.

vCPUs on these flavors are not pinned, so processor time is shared with other guests on the host, and each flavor caps disk operations and throughput. A Docker build is a CPU and disk burst; if Coolify spends the day building, a dedicated server gives it every core.

The one-click Coolify app

Coolify is one of the one-click apps on the Cloud VPS, at no charge, picked at order time or later with a reinstall. The machine boots Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, installs Coolify on first boot, and serves it over HTTPS on the machine's own DNS name under vmapps.net. The admin password is generated on the machine and written to /root/app-credentials.txt, readable by root only; it never passes through our systems.

Coolify's proxy holds ports 80 and 443 for what you deploy. The Virtual Machines tab shows the install's progress until the app answers, usually a few minutes after first boot. From then on the instance is yours to update and configure, like the rest of the machine.

Installing it yourself

To install on a plain image instead (Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux), follow the official automated path:

1. SSH in as root on a fresh machine (as a sudo user, pipe the script to sudo bash instead, and put sudo -E in front of the env-variable form). If Docker came from snap, remove it first.
2. Run the install script below. It installs what Coolify needs and prints the next steps when it finishes.
3. Browse to port 8000 on the server's IP address over plain HTTP and create the admin account immediately: whoever reaches the registration page first becomes the instance admin, with root on the server.
4. Copy /data/coolify/source/.env off the machine. It holds APP_KEY, which encrypts the secrets in Coolify's database, and a restore needs it.

curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash

To skip the open registration window entirely, the docs let you pre-create the root account with environment variables at install time:

env ROOT_USERNAME=RootUser \
ROOT_USER_EMAIL=example@example.com \
ROOT_USER_PASSWORD='StrongPassword123!' \
bash -c 'curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash'

Replace the three values before running it. The password needs at least 8 characters with upper case, lower case, a number and a symbol. The password ends up in your shell history, so run history -c afterwards (or start the line with a space where HISTCONTROL=ignorespace), then change the password in the dashboard once you sign in.

Ports to open

The firewall page lists six inbound TCP ports for the server that runs Coolify. Open only the ones you use.

Once the dashboard answers on a domain through the proxy, 8000, 6001 and 6002 can be closed to the public: the dashboard, its live connection and the terminal then ride 80 and 443. Without a provider-level firewall, the docs point to ufw-docker on the host. Keep the SSH rule in place while you edit rules; a bad one locks you out, and the browser console in the Virtual Machines tab is the way back in.

What Coolify deploys

• Applications from a Git repository, a Dockerfile, a Docker Compose file or a prebuilt image.
• Databases with persistent storage, lifecycle controls and backup settings.
• One-click services from maintained Compose templates. Workflow automation is one of them; our n8n self-hosted page covers running it on its own.
• Routing: Traefik by default (Caddy optional) matches each domain to a container and gets Let's Encrypt certificates when the domain is entered with https://.

Everything runs as plain Docker containers, networks and volumes. If the Coolify instance goes down, running resources keep running; you lose the automation and the dashboard until it returns. One instance can also manage further servers over SSH.

Keeping the instance healthy

• Backups: Settings > Backup turns on a daily instance backup. It covers Coolify's own projects and settings, not the data inside your apps or volumes, and not the .env file. Keep a copy off the server.
• Updates: Settings > Updates. Automatic updates, once enabled, run daily at midnight (instance timezone) by default; the dashboard drops for under a minute during one. Updating Coolify does not update the apps it runs.
• Builds: compiling images is the expensive part. Build elsewhere and push to a registry, or run the builds on a self-hosted CI runner, and let the VPS only pull and run.
• Mail: a new machine cannot open outbound connections on port 25 until support opens it; submission ports 465 and 587 are already open, enough for apps that hand mail to a provider.
• Operating system: Coolify does not patch the server. OS updates, SSH and firewall rules stay with you.

When a VPS is the wrong host

A Cloud VPS suits a Coolify instance running a handful of small, steady apps. Move to a physical machine when builds keep the shared vCPUs busy, when a database outgrows the largest flavor's disk-operation cap, or when egress passes the monthly allowance every month. On our Linux dedicated servers the port carries no allowance, and Coolify on the VPS can keep managing that server over SSH.