Self Hosting with Coolify and Cloudflare

The Prerequisites

1. Buy a domain
2. Get Cloudflare to manage your domain

If you’re interested in understanding a bit more about DNS resolution (which is tangentially related), you could read this: DNS From Scratch

The Guide

1. Go Get a VPS

I used Hetzner. There are plenty of resources out there that help you compare services. I’ve seen this spreadsheet linked for information on cheap providers. But to name a few I’ve seen mentioned a lot (which is in no way indicative of anything but, perhaps, popularity):

• Digital Ocean
• Vultr
• Linode
• Hostinger
• AWS Lightsail

2. Set Up Your VPS Instance

There are some minimum hardware requirements expected by Coolify you can see them here.

You can typically choose an OS and a CPU architecture as you wish. I used Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with an Intel CPU for my own. Note that, any commands to run on your terminal will assume Ubuntu with a bash shell as a consequence.

In the name of security I’d recommended you use private keys for SSH access. You can generate one with:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519

Follow the instructions on your terminal to complete creating the key pair, then upload a copy of the public key to your VPS provider, they’ll handle the rest.

Once you’re done, take note of the public IP address of your server. I’ll be using <vps-ip> as a placeholder for the rest of this guide.

You can edit your ~/.ssh/config file to make it easier to SSH into the VPS later:

Host <name-of-your-choice>
      HostName <vps-ip>
      User root
      IdentityFile <path-to-private-key>
      IdentitiesOnly yes

There’s a lot to say about managing your VPS and making sure it’s secure and kept up to date, but that’s outside the scope of this guide. I would recommend you update all the packages that have updated available before moving on to the next step.

ssh <name-of-your-choice>
apt update 
apt upgrade -y

3. Set Up Coolify

This part is relatively straightforward. You can follow the Coolify installation guide here.

Once it’s done installing, it’ll list a URL on your terminal, something like: <your-ip>:8000, which you should immediately navigate to because you’ll be prompted to set up your admin account.

4. Set Up Cloudflare for DNS Resolution

I’m going to assume you don’t want to have to access your Coolify dashboard using a raw IP address. If you do, well, you can skip this step.

Navigate to the DNS records section of your domain on the Cloudflare dashboard. You can get there from:

Account Home > [Click on your domain] > DNS > Records

You’ll have to add an A record. The details would look something like:

• Type: A
• Name: <subdomain-of-your-choice>
• Value: <vps-ip>
• Proxy Status: Proxied
• TTL: Auto

For example, if you list your subdomain as home, your intention is to set home.your-domain.com to point to your Coolify instance.

Then, navigate to /settings on your Coolify dashboard and set the Instance's Domain property to be the same value as the subdomain you just created a record for. Which, in this example, would be home.your-domain.com.

Two other things to note:

Set the SSL/TLS encryption mode to Full (Strict), you can find it under SSL/TLS in your Cloudflare dashboard for the relevant domain. As for why this is important… well, to be completely honest I’m not sure. Only that the DNS resolution didn’t work for me with the default settings.

Under Security > WAF you can set up a custom rule to limit access to the above address to only your IP address. The expression would look something like:

(not ip.src in {<home-ip>} and http.host in {"<home.your-domain.com>"})

I use an array for both values so you can extend the selection as you wish.

5. Go Wild~

You can then proceed to do play around with Coolify. You can give each of your self-hosted applications their own domain through the Coolify dashboard for the application’s configuration page. It would be something like: https://<app-name>.your-domain.com:<port> where <port> is the port the application is running in.

You’ll then have to create another A record for app-name in the Cloudflare dashboard.

If it’s meant to be a private application, you can update your Cloudflare WAF rule to include the new domain.

There’s definitely other ways to handle security and access related concerns, like Cloudflare Tunnels which Coolify has a guide on here: ‘Coolify - Cloudflare Tunnels’ or settings up access through only a VPN. Neither of which I’ve yet to try to figure out!