Migrating from CapRover to Coolify

I think I’ve been running a CapRover instance since 2019 or 2020. So long that my instance is still running Ubuntu 18.04. And, thats why I’m migrating.

Recently, I blew away all my machines and installed Ubuntu 24.04. In doing this I accidentally deleted my old CapRover SSH keys. The machine is SSH access only so I don’t have anyway to manage it, or upgrade CapRover.

I decided to spin up a new instance on Hetzner and try the backup/restore process that CapRover recommends. The process is quite clunky IMO and ultimately didn’t work. I have a number of services running on the CapRover and knowing I can’t migrate them over gave me the impetus to move completely over to Coolify.

Side note, one thing that annoyed me about CapRover is when services went down due to node issue, such as running out of RAM (underprovisioning), all the services would not automatically come back up (I miss kuberenetes!). This meant I had to go into each app and manually restart them - theres no API or CLI for this. Coolify has an API and I’m hopeful I could write scripts to do this.

So far I’m really enjoying Coolify. I like the approach to deploying services from GitHub. CapRover used webhooks but each service needed to manually sign in and then copy/paste the webhook address into the repo. Coolify instead creates a GitHub App so you can add whichever repo’s you want and it automatically has access to them. Much better DX.

I use basic auth a lot on my CapRover services (e.g. NTFY and ChangeDetection.io). Coolify doesn’t have a button/automation for this. You have to manually add a label to the service file (compose file) which Traefik then enforces. Its not too hard but its also not as easy as a button and form with username/ password fields for the auth like CapRover does. Also I’m not sure how it handles websockets which, again, CapRover sets up with a single click. I suspect this might another Traefik config I’ll have to set.

So far, so good. Glad I made the switch.

Tags:

#caprover #coolify #paas