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Version: Canary

Deploy to Coolify

Coolify is a self-hosted alternative to Heroku/Railway-style PaaS platforms — you run it on your own server(s) and it manages builds and deploys for you. It's the best fit on the any container host list for anyone self-hosting: it's free, open source, and — uniquely among the platforms Cedar documents — its build packs can natively express the recommended two-service topology instead of forcing single-container.

Single-service (start here)​

  1. Create a new Coolify application from your Cedar repo.
  2. Leave the build pack on its default (Nixpacks or Railpack). Coolify finds build and start in package.json and runs them with no configuration.
  3. Add a Postgres database from Coolify's resource catalog, and set DATABASE_URL on the application to point at it.
  4. Deploy.

This runs the single-container topology — the fastest way to get a working deploy.

Migrations​

Coolify doesn't have a dedicated pre-deploy hook the way Railway does. Run migrations as part of your build command, or as a one-off command against the running container:

yarn cedar prisma migrate deploy

Custom server file​

If your app has a custom server file (api/src/server.ts), single-service won't work — a custom server file is a Fastify concept with no equivalent in the single-container in-process server, so start refuses to start rather than silently skipping what you configured (Realtime, custom plugins, custom middleware). Skip straight to scaling up to two services below, and set the api service's start command to yarn start:api — that path does run the server file.

Scaling up: two services, the Coolify way​

This is what sets Coolify apart from the other platforms on the any container host list: alongside Nixpacks/Railpack, Coolify also has a Static build pack. That means you can express Cedar's recommended topology — static web/dist served separately from a Node api process — as two Coolify resources instead of one, without reaching for a Dockerfile:

  1. api service — Nixpacks/Railpack build pack, start command yarn start:api.
  2. web service — Static build pack, pointed at web/dist after running yarn build. Coolify serves it directly rather than running a Node process for it.

Because the web service is static, there's no Node process for it to proxy requests through — --apiProxyTarget is a Fastify feature, and Fastify only runs under start:web. Instead, before running yarn build, set apiUrl in cedar.toml to the api service's fully-qualified Coolify-provided domain (e.g. https://api.yourapp.example, not a relative path like the single-service setup uses). Cedar bakes apiUrl into the web bundle at build time, so the browser calls the api service directly — no proxy needed. This makes the two services cross-origin, so you'll also need to configure CORS on the api side.

This is the one platform in this doc set where the recommended topology doesn't cost you anything extra to set up — no reverse proxy, nginx config, or Node process to run for the web side, since Coolify's Static build pack and a fully-qualified apiUrl cover it between them.