Apps

Apps are containers that Dockfly deploys and manages: APIs, databases, services and so on.

Sources

• An image, such as postgres:17 or ghcr.io/user/app.
• A Dockerfile in a GitHub or GitLab repository, rebuilt on every push. Connecting the repository is described in Deploying from GitHub and GitLab.
• A docker-compose.yml in the repository: see Compose apps below.
• A one-click template: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, n8n and Uptime Kuma.

If you have more than one server, you choose which one the app runs on when you create it.

Deployments

• Zero downtime: the new container starts, passes its health check (an HTTP path, the image’s HEALTHCHECK or an open port) and only then receives traffic. If it fails, the previous version keeps serving and the log shows the container’s output.
• With volumes (databases, for example), the current version is stopped before the new one starts: two instances writing to the same data would corrupt it.

Apps find each other by name on the internal network (postgres:5432) without being exposed.

Each app also has encrypted environment variables, memory and CPU limits, live logs, and restart and stop actions.

Roll back

In an app’s Deployments tab, Roll back to this version redeploys the image of a previous deployment without rebuilding it. This is only possible while that image still exists.

Compose apps

Dockfly runs a docker-compose.yml from your repository with a helper container that has Compose, and connects the web service to its network.

Use named volumes: relative host paths such as ./data:/data do not work.

Compose deployments go through a proxy that rejects anything that would give control of the server, such as privileged containers or sensitive host mounts. The full list is in Docker security.

Resources

The Resources tab shows the live CPU and memory of the app’s container, refreshed every 5 seconds. CPU is shown as a share of all the server’s cores. For Compose apps it measures only the service that receives the web traffic.

Console

The Console tab runs a single command with sh -c inside the app’s container and shows its output and exit code. It is available to the deployer and admin roles.

It is not an interactive terminal: every command starts from scratch, so cd and variables do not carry over from one command to the next.

Limits: 2 minutes per command, and output is cut at 256 KB.

Scheduled tasks

The Scheduled tasks tab holds commands that run inside the app’s container on a cron schedule.

The schedule has 5 fields and is evaluated in UTC:

minute  hour  day-of-month  month  day-of-week

Syntax	Meaning	Example
*	Every value	* * * * *
A value	That value only	0 3 * * *
1-5	A range	0 9 * * 1-5
1,15	A list	0 0 1,15 * *
*/10	A step	*/10 * * * *

A task can be paused and can be run on demand with Run now. It shows the output and exit code of its last run.

• Tasks of stopped or undeployed apps are skipped.
• Each run is limited to 30 minutes.
• A failed task can send a notification.

Database backups

PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB and Redis apps have a Backups tab with scheduled backups. See Databases and backups.