21 ms·
Show HN: An open-source, self-hostable Heroku and Netlify alternative
- bgorman 6y agoWhy would anyone use this instead of Dokku?
- tyingq 6y agoIt does have a built-in web UI. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExRnXpbWYAkOO-x?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExRnXpbWYAkOO-x?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExRnXpdXIAAmP_8?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExRnXpdXIAAmP_8?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExRnXpdXEAQHu5B?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExRnXpdXEAQHu5B?format=jpg&name=... Though I'm sure many 3rd party ones exist for Dokku.
- ponytech 6y agoDokku is building an official web UI : https://twitter.com/dokku/status/1334801381778219008 https://twitter.com/dokku/status/1334801381778219008 Closed-source and a paid product though.
- andrasbacsai 6y agoIt will more than a PaaS. Planned to have services integrated, that needed for your application, like analytics, error reporting, feedback management, etc.
- TruthWillHurt 6y agoIt's not more than a PaaS when it's running on a single machine.
- f6v 6y agoI wonder how these two compare when it comes to scaling. Last time I tried Dokku it wasn't meant to run on several instances.
- andrasbacsai 6y agoCurrently scaling is not possible, but most parts are built scaling in mind. I would like to support Kubernetes later on, but first Docker Swarm, which is way simpler.
- joshmanders 6y agoDokku now has a kubernetes scheduler to allow it to scale horizontally also.
- debarshri 6y agoThis is positioned to be competing product to netlify and vercel. However, it doesn't make sense to host it yourself as core benefit of host a static pages and node js apps on netlify is use their CDN infrastructure. It would actually cost you more to host self host it than using alternatives. Also this is definitely not a PaaS substitute. It is great attempt at a netlify alternative, but fall very short from being a production grade platform. Just an analysis, don't burn me please.
- tyingq 6y agoCouldn't you pair it with, say, Cloudflare? Perhaps something like that is coming functionality within the product, but it's easy enough to do yourself for now.
- debarshri 6y agoWhy not AWS for that matter. There is difference between IaaS and PaaS. This is more in the realm of PaaS. You cannot compare with infrastructure providers per say, in my opinion.
- tyingq 6y agoI mentioned Cloudflare because the end-to-end setup to CDN front whatever you create in "Coolify" is fairly simple and likely once per site.
- andrasbacsai 6y agoAtm, it's not aiming to be a production-grade system. Indie hackers, hobbyists, probably do not need that to start working on their side project. Also, I'm thinking of provide a hosted version of it, but not know. I want to concentrate on the features now.
- debarshri 6y agoOk, cool. Then it is a great hobby project to have!
- codetheweb 6y agoThis looks pretty cool! Is it basically Dokku with a web interface? https://dokku.com/docs/ https://dokku.com/docs/
- chasd00 6y agoI'm a big fan of Dokku and use it on a number of personal projects. It's come a long way. Having deployment just be a push to a remote repository is really nice.
- michaelpb 6y agoAlso a Dokku fan. I don't think this project is related or uses it under the hood ( https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify/search?q=dokku https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify/search?q=dokku ), although it's clearly similar. The marketing page only mentions Node.js support, but the Readme mentions using Buildpacks (https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify ) although it still isn't clear if it supports languages other than Node JavaScript. I would assume though if the goal is to support buildpacks and be a true Heroku replacement it will soon support everything just like Dokku. Definitely very cool and something to keep an eye on as it develops!
- joshmanders 6y agoLooking through code [0] it doesn't look like they use buildpacks but just construct a Dockerfile based on some config values and run `docker build`. [0]: https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify/blob/main/api/packs/nodejs/index.js https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify/blob/main/api/packs/no...
- michaelpb 6y agoHuh, then that's confusing that the README mentions it. It could just be a planned feature and that wasn't properly clarified.
- mplewis 6y agoFor other folks who couldn't find the documentation for this project: https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoI like it, I might try it against Caprover and Portainer to see what's up.
- _joel 6y agoIt looks nice but I couldn't envisage using it personally. I love netlify and it's whole CI/CD integration, but more importantly it's free for 100GB/month. After that I'd just pay (as 100GB/month for a static site seems a fair amount of virtual footfall)
- oakesm9 6y agoLooks nice from screenshots on the Github page. It seems to be very similar to Caprover (https://caprover.com/ https://caprover.com/) with less features but a slightly nicer design.
- thepra 6y agoOther than github, gitea/gitlab is supported? Is there CI/CD for .Net Core kind of apps?
- andrasbacsai 6y agoCurrently, not, but it's planned to support more Git providers, and other kind of apps, like PHP (I like it, roast me). :)
- amerine 6y agoNice! Good Luck!
- andrasbacsai 6y agoThank you! :)
- sneak 6y agoFor comparison, the one I use is called CapRover, and works great for my small use cases. It's like dokku with a web interface, and can do rebuilds from git webhooks.
- antman 6y agoAnother vote for CapRover, has many addons easy to also add also your docker based apps. Not a full production system but nice out of the box interface and monitoring. If it removes its single points of failure it might even turn out to compete with the big guys.
- arisudesu 6y agoLooks promising. Judging by the screenshots, this just solves what I didn't like about Dokku - the need to configure the application from the terminal, instead of a convenient web panel. Will it be possible to use Golang? Or use the Dockerfile from the repository to build the container and run it? This way you can even compete with Portainer.
- RileyJames 6y agoInteresting, that cli focused deploy / management is what I like about dokku. It fits well with into the rails dev cycle which rarely leaves the terminal / text editor.
- andrasbacsai 6y agoIt will support other languages, not just Node.js. About Dockerfile, I do not see any problem with supporting that case as well, but not in my top priorities now. :)
- nvr219 6y agomust be dokku (dock)
- gwbas1c 6y agoOne of the things that's valuable with Heroku is how simple it is to get a domain name with a certificate for HTTPS. Assuming I'm running that on my NAS, I understand setting up port forwarding through my router; but what about domains and HTTPs?
- yellowapple 6y agoDomain through FreeDNS (or GoDaddy, or Route 53, or Namecheap, or whatever), and cert through Let's Encrypt? Both of those steps are pretty dead simple individually, though it's admittedly nice to knock out both at once. That's essentially what I'm doing for my own website, as one example. Granted, that's on a VPS instead of a home NAS, but the idea's the same; neither a domain registrar nor an ACME provider necessarily care.
- saurik 6y agoBut Heroku was a closed-source, cloud-hosted, alternative to self-hosting... can't you just, I dunno, run your app? :(
- joseph 6y agoI doubt if someone wanting to run an app is the target audience. A lot of companies would love to have something like Heroku that could be hosted internally. A platform team hosts it and development teams consume it. As it stands, they are stuck hand rolling their own poor implementations. Lots of wasted person-hours are happening in this space due to a lack of good, stable solutions that won't disappear (I don't know if this one qualifies).
- bassdropvroom 6y ago> As it stands, they are stuck hand rolling their own poor implementations It's either that or it's the monster that is Kubernetes.
- sofixa 6y agoMultiple projects like OpenFaaS and Knative try to bridge that moat. And then there's also Nomad, which is drastically simpler than k8s. Not Heroku-easier, but closer to docker-compose than Kubernetes. Self-plugging my article on the Nomad vs Kubernetes subject: https://atodorov.me/2021/02/27/why-you-should-take-a-look-at-nomad-before-jumping-on-kubernetes/ https://atodorov.me/2021/02/27/why-you-should-take-a-look-at...
- bassdropvroom 6y agoI have not had hands on experience with nomad, but as I understand it, it still requires a lot of plumbing. Something as simple as service discovery isn't, and requires a completely separate consul cluster. Similarly, there is no secrets management, which requires a vault cluster, which in turn requires a it's own consul cluster. I'm not sure what config management options there are. So now you're stuck with 3 consul clusters, a vault cluster, whatever you choose for config management, and a nomad cluster. Feels like you didn't gain much from the simplicity of nomad. In addition to that, knowing Hashicorp's pricing, I bet that set up would run you north of a million a year for enterprise setup.
- FearlessNebula 6y agoIm not sure I understand the need for this. Isn't the point of Heroku a platform as a service to abstract out having to host it yourself? Wouldn't someone just host the app at that point?
- turtlebits 6y agoThere are a lot of services that you don't necessarily need the production level uptime and don't want to pay the high price for.
- pageandrew 6y agoOne possibility is an organization that wants ordinary application developers to have a Heroku-like brainless git-push-to-deploy experience, and also has a dedicated infra team that has the bandwidth to manage a self-hosted PaaS.
- jclos 6y agoI wish my university had something like this for internal use (student projects, research).
- ezekg 6y agoI've used Heroku for over 7 years. Heroku's selling point is essentially devops-as-a-service. That's why they can get away with charging so much compared to the hosting competition. A "self-hostable Heroku" doesn't make sense, at least to me. With this, I'd have to do devops, like every other hosting platform. Granted, I did only scan the home page, so perhaps I'm missing something.
- yellowapple 6y agoSomething like this would be pretty handy in an org where I need to run my own servers for various reasons (e.g. I need to be on-prem, or pretending to be on-prem via some VPN connection to AWS or something) and still want devs to be able to have a Heroku-like deployment experience.
- bigbob2 6y agoThis seems like the sweet spot to me. Often times there are smaller internal services which need to be hosted and at a small to medium sized org there's a good chance there won't be proper budget allocated for devops, k8s and the likes. Would be much easier for said org to pay a few hundred (few thousand?) a year and not worry about it. Or make it free and bill them for support when they want to scale up... A bit easier to charge money when the customer is making money in the process.
- turtlebits 6y agoMaintaining one service is still much easier than maintaining individual projects.
- daxelrod 6y agoThink about it this way. Let’s say you’re a company with 500 engineers. Heroku is still a fantastic abstraction to provide to product teams, but the economics may make sense to have a 5-person team owning and maintaining that infrastructure over paying Heroku to do it. This makes even more sense if you’ve got your own data centers and need data locality.
- dominik-2020 6y agoFor me the whole point of using netlify is that I don't need to do anything. Set and forget.
- thitcanh 6y agoThis also supports Node.js apps and databases. Describing it as a Netlify alternative is reductive.
- mxschmitt 6y agoBuilding such a thing is not that a high effort, reliability, extensibility and scalability are the things which are not easy to implement. For a small scale like hobby projects it definitely makes sense to use such stuff but not for things where you want to press a button to provision new nodes in different regions with e.g. GKE Autopilot or Render.com. Like things where you rely on a bulletproof CDN e.g. from Vercel or Netfliy. btw. I'm curious why their installer is 73MB in size: https://get.coollabs.io/coolify-installer https://get.coollabs.io/coolify-installer
- Aeolun 6y agoI don’t there is nearly enough information on this page to justify running a random script on my server.
- ramchip 6y agoThe license is Affero GPLv3. Does this mean anyone who self-hosts an app using this needs to make their source code available?
- webmaven 6y agoIt should only require you to provide source to any changes you make to Coolify itself (or code that is integrated with Coolify) if you make a public deployment of Coolify (eg. you launch a Heroku competitor). Private (ie. accessible to employees or contractors only) deployments of Coolify shouldn't trigger the requirement. I've seen some difference of opinion as to whether giving access to a supplier triggers the requirement, giving access to a client does generally require you to provide source to them. Code merely deployed by Coolify should not be affected in any case.
- chii 6y agothere's no difference between "private" deployment and "public" deployment. AGPL requires that if the client of the service asks for the source, you are obliged to give it to them. So if you have a private network, but give a client/customer access to it, and they ask for the source, you will have the obligation to give it to them.
- webmaven 6y agoIsn't that what I said?
- vorpalhex 6y agoNeat. I have some users who want this kind of experience but want to be hosted on my hardware - this looks like a potential good fit for our use case. Thanks!
- f430 6y agoHow can I donate? I recommend you put a donate link on your website. I always support open source alternatives like this.
- andrasbacsai 6y agoWow, thanks for the motivation!! I wasn't expecting this kind of "hype" around it, that's why there is no such thing on the website.
- andrasbacsai 6y agoJust set up a ko-fi page here: https://ko-fi.com/andrasbacsai https://ko-fi.com/andrasbacsai :D
- 40four 6y agoI applaud the effort here, it looks like a worthy project. I like the idea of effortless git deployments & databases. Easy upgrades, backups, analytics etc. But as others have pointed out, to call it a self-hostable Heroku & Netlify is indeed missing the point. It’s a bit of an oxymoron right? The benefit of those services is in their CDN network, and the fact that they provide the platform and you don’t have to maintain your own server. Things I do not get with maintaining my own VPS. Doesn’t mean I’m still not interested in this project, it looks pretty nice! But I would approach the marketing differently.
- jbm 6y agoHeroku does not have a CDN. IMO you'd pay for Heroku because of the ability to have one vendor deal with your full stack, including Postgres, and having the ability to roll back / scale up with relative ease. You pay for that ease and support. (Everyone on the support team was a dev too) For some teams it makes less sense than others. You can also probably find combinations of vendors to deal with most of the above. Source: Was a customer architect there.
- fnomnom 6y agobonus feat for heroku for a lot of teams is that their infrastructure bill comes from exactly ONE provider that includes your appservers, database, caches etc. this eases biling/budget things in some companies by an order of magnitude or two.
- 40four 6y agoThanks, my mistake.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoHeroku has Edge CDN option no?
- jbm 6y agoSorry for the late answer but only if you get an addon and those aren't provided by Heroku.
- nielsbot 6y agoWhat if Netlify just open-sourced their stack and continued to sell their hosting service? (edit: typo)
- shankspeaks 6y agoVery nice. Especially kicked you've used Svelte/Routify to for the management app. I've been looking for a reference app for this setup, so thanks for that :)
- tweetle_beetle 6y agoSurprised by the number of snarky comments on here pointing out the obvious. "Self-hostable X" always involves some kind of compromise and people interested in self-hosting are aware of this. The massive popularity of things like cPanel shows that there is most definitely a market for people who want some assistance setting things up, but don't want to go down a fully managed route.