Installing Coolify on a Raspberry Pi 5

Installing Coolify on a Raspberry Pi 5

I had a Raspberry Pi 5 sitting unused and kept hearing good things about Coolify as a self-hosting platform, so I figured I'd try it. My Synology NAS doesn't really have the horsepower for Docker containers, and adding a Pi on the side feels cheaper than upgrading the NAS.

I tried Portainer at some point and it was fine, but somehow I never reached for it and eventually shut it down. Maybe this one will stick.

Install Raspberry Pi OS

Flash an SD card with the Raspberry Pi OS Downloader. The installer lets you enable SSH and set the WiFi password up front, which saves a bunch of faff.

Once it boots you can SSH in via username@raspberrypi.local.

Install Coolify

One line in the SSH terminal:

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

When it finishes the Coolify UI is on http://raspberrypi.local:8000.

Cloudflare Tunnels

The Pi sits behind a NAT router, which makes exposing anything directly a pain. Cloudflare Tunnels are a nice way around that — you run the cloudflared daemon, it opens an outbound connection to Cloudflare, and you get a public URL on a domain you own.

You can apparently run it from inside Coolify, but installing it directly was simpler:

sudo apt install cloudflared

Notes to self when adding a new service

  • Make sure the port is actually exposed in the docker-compose.yml.
  • Point the service URL at https://subdomain.domain.com and let Coolify handle the TLS cert.