4 posts tagged with "docker-compose"

Self-hosted Chatwoot is free under the MIT licence and keeps full API and webhook access. On Chatwoot Cloud, the free plan lost both on 16 July 2026. To self-host it you need four things: the Chatwoot Community Edition image (chatwoot/chatwoot:<version>-ce), PostgreSQL with the pgvector extension, Redis, and a Sidekiq worker next to the Rails server. The Docker Compose file below starts all four. It idles at about 810 MB of RAM.

Conflict of interest, stated up front: I run Hostim.dev, a hosting platform, and there is a one-click Chatwoot template on it. A pricing change that pushes people toward self-hosting is good for me. So every number below is either measured or linked, and the Docker Compose path runs on any server you like, not on ours.

To self-host n8n with Docker Compose you need one docker-compose.yml with the n8nio/n8n image, a named volume mounted at /home/node/.n8n, and the N8N_HOST, WEBHOOK_URL and GENERIC_TIMEZONE environment variables set — then docker compose up -d. The default setup stores everything in SQLite and speaks plain HTTP on port 5678, so this guide also covers the four things that bare file leaves out: PostgreSQL, restarting after a reboot, HTTPS, and doing it all without Traefik.

n8n is a popular open-source automation tool – like Zapier, but self-hosted. Here's how to run it on your own VPS using Docker Compose, and expose it securely over HTTPS using Caddy as the ingress proxy.

If you want a broader primer, check out How to Self-Host a Docker Compose App. But you don't need to read it first – this guide is self-contained.

🗓️ Last updated: August 2026. Tested with the latest n8nio/n8n image on Ubuntu 24.04.

Most side projects start the same way. You grab a VPS from Hetzner or DigitalOcean, install Docker, run docker compose up, and boom – you're live.

It feels cheap. It feels simple. Until it isn't.

You've got a working docker-compose.yml, and now you want to put it online.

Maybe it's a SaaS side project. A personal site. A dashboard for a client. Whatever it is – you're here because you want to host a Compose app, and you don't want to spend hours fiddling with YAML, CI pipelines, or Kubernetes manifests.

Let's walk through what it really takes to host a Docker Compose project on your own. And then I'll show you what I built to make this process go away – for myself and anyone else who's tired of copy-pasting configs.