How to Setup an Https Custom Domain with Coolify

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I've been using Coolify to host my websites on a personal VPS for the past few months. In a previous guide we talked about how to setup a custom domain with Coolify and here we'll discuss how to enable https so your site can be hit like https://yourdomain.tld.

Setting up a Custom Domain with Coolify

To setup a custom domain you need to:

Configure your domain's DNS records to point to your server's IP
- This is typically an A record that points @ to the server IP
Configure your app on Coolify to list the custom domain in the Domains section

For more detailed instructions and a video walkthrough, see: How to configure a Custom Domain on Coolify.

Setting up Https with Coolify

Https enables traffic to be e2e encrypted from a user's browser to your server and back. It also helps to ensure that the site is "official" to prevent malicious actors from pretending to be your site. This is mostly handled with SSL certificates which are basically identifiers proving that your site is official.

Going into specifics about how SSL certs work is beyond the scope of the post but basically we need one on our server to show that the server is an official provider for the given domain.

There are two primary ways to do this:

Let Coolify handle https / ssl certs for you - Good for most apps
Do it yourself - Good if you want more control, maybe for an enterprise with a fleet of servers

Let Coolify Handle Https / SSL Certs

This is the simplest way. If you configure your domain on Coolify beginning with https then Coolify will kick off a certificate creation process for you.

The way this works is it uses Let's Encrypt (an SSL Certificate Authority) to verify and issue an SSL Certificate then it hosts it on the server. In order for this to work, you need your domain's DNS to have an A record pointing to your server's IP Address - this is how Let's Encrypt verifies that the server at that IP address is an official provider for your domain.

Save your https domain in your app's Coolify configuration then wait a minute or two and https should work.

(This is how I do https for my sites - like One Million Checkboxes and CloudCompare)

Configure Https / SSL Certs Yourself

This one is more complicated but not terrible. I would only recommend doing this if you really want more control for some reason.

Generate your own SSL certificate
Copy the files into the /data/coolify/proxy directory of your server
Configure traefik (the router / load balancer) for your app to use the custom SSL certificates

If you go this route, reference the official docs as it may change: https://coolify.io/docs/knowledge-base/proxy/traefik/custom-ssl-certs

So that's how you can setup https domains for your apps running Coolify. This is how I've done it for my recent apps - it works well and is pretty simple.

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