Self-Hosting Coolify on Gozunga Cloud is simple and gives you complete control. Follow these instructions to enable endless application hosting capabilities that can scale with your needs.

1. Overview
2. Create Your Gozunga Account - First, Sign Up to access your dashboard.
3. Launch an Instance - You can start with a low end instance and can resize as you grow.
4. Secure Your Instance - Connect to perform some basic setup tasks.
5. (Optional) Verify SSH - Test your SSH connection to the server, if you want to log in.
6. First Login - Finish securing your instance and log in to Coolify.

1. Overview

This guide will walk you through the process of installing and configuring Coolify on Gozunga Cloud. Coolify is a powerful platform that allows you to host your own applications with complete control. We utilize a powerful feature of Gozunga Cloud called cloud-init, which allows us to install Coolify at install time, so that we get a freshly installed server with Coolify already installed and ready to use.

By default, our server instances do not permit ANY inbound traffic, so we need to secure our instance by allowing the necessary ports for Coolify to function. You'll see a focus on this in Step 3.

2. Create your Gozunga Account

If you haven't yet done so, Create an Account. You can sign up for free and get $200 in credits to get started! This generous credit allows you to explore our platform and host your Coolify instance without any upfront costs. Perfect for developers and businesses looking to self-host their applications with complete control over their infrastructure.

Why choose Gozunga Cloud for your Coolify setup?

• High-performance infrastructure with 99.99% uptime SLA
• 24/7 expert support to help you every step of the way
• Flexible scaling - start small and grow as needed

3. Launch an instance

We need to create a server to host our Coolify instance. You can start with a low-end instance, and resize later as you grow. If you have another server ready for this task, you may skip this step.

💡 Pro Tip: Our st.small1 instance type is sized perfectly for Coolify and costs just a few dollars per month.

• Login to Gozunga's Cloud Management Portal, and create a Project to house your virtual machine instance.
• From the Server pane, click Create a Cloud Server
• Select your favorite Linux distribution (ex Ubuntu 24.04) and instance size (st.small1)
• Choose your network settings (ex. Public Network → Internet), and the appropriate SSH key.
• Under Cloud configuration, in order to take care of Coolify installation at install time using Linux' cloud-init, we will include the following configuration:

#cloud-config
package_update: true
package_upgrade: true
packages:
  - curl
runcmd:
  - curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash
final_message: "Coolify installation has been completed. The system is now ready to use after $UPTIME seconds."

• Then choose a name for the server (ex. 'coolify') and click Create Server

The server installation, package updates and Coolify installation will take 3-4 minutes to complete. We'll come back to that after the next step. For now, take note of the servers IP address.

4. Secure your Instance

While we're waiting for the server to provision and Coolify to install, we'll update our security groups to allow us to securely log in to the server remotely.

Before we get started, you may want to review our knowledge base guide Using Security Groups to understand this critical security component of our infrastructure platform.

First, we will create security group rules to allow secure inbound connectivity to Coolify for management as follows:

• Choose Networking → Security Groups
• Create a new security group called Coolify Management
• Click in to the security group and add the following rules:

Ports for Secure Coolify Management

Coolify Web Management Interface - TCP/8000

• This is HTTP traffic so we want to proceed with caution and only allow access from our IP address. This is only necessary for initial installation purposes, and can be disabled after the initial setup.

WEBSOCKET - TCP/6001

TERMINAL - TCP/6002

(Optional) PING

(Optional) SSH - TCP/22

Exposed Ports for Standard Production Operations

HTTP - TCP/80

• HTTP port is critical for letsencrypt SSL certificates and any insecure application traffic (redirects to HTTPS most commonly)

HTTPS - TCP/443

• HTTPS is critical for all application traffic as well as in-band management of the coolify instance.

Creating the security groups does not automatically apply them to the server. Be sure to follow the instructions, specifically about applying this Security Group to the Virtual Machine instance we created.

• Once these rules are in place, you must apply the security group to the virtual machine instance we created.
• Select the Security Groups tab from a Virtual Machine instance
• Choose + Add Security Group and select the Coolify Management security group we created
• Finally, click Add Security Group to apply the security group to the virtual machine instance.

Advanced Method: Using OpenStack CLI

If you prefer to use the command line, you can create the security groups and rules using OpenStack CLI:

# Create the Coolify Management security group
openstack security group create --description "Security group for Coolify management access" coolify-management

# Add rules for Coolify Management (restricted to your IP)
# Replace YOUR_IP_ADDRESS with your actual IP address (e.g., 24.68.123.45/32)

# Coolify Web Management Interface - TCP/8000
openstack security group rule create --protocol tcp --dst-port 8000:8000 --remote-ip YOUR_IP_ADDRESS coolify-management

# Coolify Websocket - TCP/6001
openstack security group rule create --protocol tcp --dst-port 6001:6001 --remote-ip YOUR_IP_ADDRESS coolify-management

# Coolify Terminal - TCP/6002
openstack security group rule create --protocol tcp --dst-port 6002:6002 --remote-ip YOUR_IP_ADDRESS coolify-management

# Optional: PING (ICMP)
openstack security group rule create --protocol icmp --remote-ip YOUR_IP_ADDRESS coolify-management

# Optional: SSH - TCP/22
openstack security group rule create --protocol tcp --dst-port 22:22 --remote-ip YOUR_IP_ADDRESS coolify-management

# HTTP - TCP/80 (public access)
openstack security group rule create --protocol tcp --dst-port 80:80 --remote-ip 0.0.0.0/0 coolify-management

# HTTPS - TCP/443 (public access)
openstack security group rule create --protocol tcp --dst-port 443:443 --remote-ip 0.0.0.0/0 coolify-management

# Apply the security group to your server instance
# Replace YOUR_SERVER_NAME with your actual server name
openstack server add security group YOUR_SERVER_NAME coolify-management

See Using Security Groups for more information.

5. (Optional) Verify SSH

The installation process we're using here doesn't require you to even SSH to the server, but if you're like me, you'll want to log in anyway; here is how

• Using the SSH key you selected when creating the virtual machine, SSH to your new server. Take note of the IP address from our Cloud Management Portal.

# If necessary on MacOS or Linux
chmod 600 /path/to/.pem

# SSH to your new server using the key.
# If you are using your own supplied SSH key, specify the proper path
ssh -i /path/to/.pem ubuntu@[YOUR_SERVER_IP]

# Hopefully you'll see the user shell prompt
ubuntu:~$

6. First Login

Last steps before we can host our apps.

• Visit http://[ip-address]:8000 to create your Coolify admin account
• Make sure your account is created and you're seeing the on-boarding screen
• Skip on-boarding, and choose Settings from the left menu
• Enter your instance's hostname with https://fqdn format, ex https://coolify.yourdomain.com
  • This allows remote TLS access over standard port TCP/443
• Make sure to switch your browser to that new URL to confirm you can log in - e.g. https://coolify.mydomain.com

That's it! Now you're ready to create a Project within the Coolify admin portal to continue your journey

After installation, you can:

• Deploy applications from Git repositories
• Set up databases and other services
• Configure SSL certificates
• Set up monitoring and logging
• Scale your applications as needed

For more information about Coolify features and capabilities, visit the official Coolify documentation.

Ready to deploy? Get $200 in free credits and start hosting your applications on Gozunga Cloud today!