last week i ditched managed hosting and moved to a vps.

now the next thing i will tackle is managed database hosting — render, neon, supabase are EVIL and a psyop to keep you a noob forever.

so we will

• host our own postgresql db
• migrate all the data from the neondb

let me first finish my basil pesto pasta first.

yeah i’m done. let’s start. ssh into my vps. update from last time, i am done with setting up dns records, certbot, caddy on vps.

the servers will be down for some time but who cares. i’ll first stop all my running docker containers with a docker stop & docker rm.

let’s configure the db now.

i’ll edit the .env in the project root first. currently it only has a DATABASE_URL & SECRET_KEY. i’ll add these too:

SECRET_KEY=BD266259487560467C42A68A8305490C
APP_PORT=8000
APP_HOST=example
DATABASE_URL=postgresql+psycopg2://appuser:strong-app-pass@postgres:5432/appdb
POSTGRES_SUPER_PASS=super-strong-root-pass
APP_DB_NAME=appdb
APP_DB_USER=appuser
APP_DB_PASS=strong-app-pass
PGADMIN_EMAIL=you@example.com
PGADMIN_PASS=super-strong-pgadmin-pass
APP_DOMAIN=example.com
EMAIL_FOR_TLS=you@example.com

update — i did some things and the VPS crashed. so i will upgrade the vps specs and remove pgadmin. we don’t need it. i need a gf, not pgadmin.

the vps crashed because i tried to run pgadmin which is not possible on a machine with this low specs. i’m proceeding with the implementation now. till now i’ve only set the .env for the project.

we are now on a $5 plan.

listen.

i have a job and bunch of things to do so let’s do a pivot. let’s not make our lives easier. we have a dockerized app. let’s just use coolify.

but for coolify i will have to upgrade my vps again. i’m upping it to 1 vCPU, 2048 MB RAM, 55 GB SSD, 2.00 TB Transfer, $10.00/mo plan.

# this is for a cleanup, i want a fresh start
rm -rf /Users/shydev/.ssh/known_hosts
 
# this is for installing coolify 🐐
sudo apt upgrade && sudo apt update
url -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash

with one command i have coolify up and running on my vps now.

what to write after it? there’s literally nothing. i had 0 issues deploying it with coolify because my app is dockerized. start a project, add an application deploy my app.

then i added a postgresql db to my project. and did the data migration.

export NEON_URL='postgres://<neon_user>:<neon_pass>@<neon_host>/<neon_db>?sslmode=require'
export LOCAL_URL='postgres://shydev:<local_pass>@localhost:5432/examplehdb'
 
pg_dump --format=custom --no-owner --no-privileges --clean "$NEON_URL" \
| pg_restore --no-owner --no-privileges --clean --if-exists --dbname="$LOCAL_URL"

and migration complete.

that’s it.