Coolify is a self-hosted deployment platform. It manages Docker containers, handles SSL certificates, and provides a web UI for infrastructure management. It’s a good tool. It also runs five containers that eat about a gigabyte of RAM just to show you a dashboard.

We keep Traefik (Coolify’s reverse proxy) running at all times — it’s the single entry point for all web traffic. But the five UI containers? Stopped.

The containers

Coolify’s architecture splits into:

  • coolify-proxy (Traefik) — the reverse proxy. This is the one that matters. It routes all incoming traffic to the right container based on hostname and path rules. It handles TLS termination. It must always be running.
  • coolify — the web UI (Laravel)
  • coolify-db — PostgreSQL database
  • coolify-redis — Redis cache
  • coolify-realtime — WebSocket server for live updates
  • coolify-sentinel — monitoring agent

The last five are only needed when you want to use the Coolify dashboard. For day-to-day operations — where traffic flows in and containers serve content — they’re dead weight.

The savings

Stopping those five containers frees up roughly a gigabyte of RAM. On a VPS where every megabyte counts (because you’re running email, wikis, web apps, monitoring, and a dozen other services), that’s significant.

The start/stop sequence matters:

# Stop (any order is fine)
docker stop coolify coolify-db coolify-redis coolify-realtime coolify-sentinel

# Start (database and cache first, then the rest)
docker start coolify-db coolify-redis coolify coolify-realtime coolify-sentinel

Database and Redis need to be up before the Laravel app starts, or you get connection errors in the UI. It’s a 30-second operation either way.

When to start them

Occasionally you need the Coolify UI — to check deployment logs, update environment variables, or manage resources through the web interface. Start the five containers, do your work, stop them again.

In practice, most infrastructure management happens through SSH, Docker CLI, and file editing. The UI is a convenience, not a necessity. And a gigabyte of RAM is a tangible resource.

The philosophical angle

There’s something satisfying about a deployment platform whose own management UI is optional. Traefik and Docker are the actual infrastructure — they route traffic and run containers. Everything else is interface. And interfaces are expensive when they’re always on but rarely used.