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Deployments & App Management

How do we manage your server

A properly configured host is the key to running your apps quickly and securely.

When you add your server to DollarDeploy, we install the software your workloads need, configure the reverse proxy, and set up HTTPS with Let's Encrypt (certbot).

What does not run on your server

The DollarDeploy control plane runs elsewhere, not on your application server. Specifically, these never run on your server:

  • The DollarDeploy web control plane
  • The DollarDeploy UI and API
  • The native build infrastructure (builds for supported native apps run on DollarDeploy's build infrastructure, not on your server)

The only DollarDeploy component that can run on your server is the optional DDAgent. It is lightweight and takes a fraction of the server's resources, and it reports back to the dashboard: server and application metrics, application logs, and health status. You can run without it; you then lose that dashboard monitoring.

This is the core architectural difference from self-hosted platforms like Coolify or Dokploy, where the deployment control plane itself runs on the server you operate.

Operating system requirements

The server must run a supported operating system and version (this is the same canonical list as the supported-providers page):

  • Operating system: Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04 or 24.04 LTS, or Debian 11 or 12. Other distributions are not supported.
  • Architecture: x86-64 (amd64) or ARM64 (arm64).
  • Minimum resources: 1 GB RAM and 10 GB disk.
  • Access: root or sudo SSH access.

Installed software

Core dependencies

  • sudo - System administration tool
  • nginx - Web server and reverse proxy
  • logrotate - Log file rotation utility
  • tzdata - Timezone data
  • curl - Command line tool for transferring data
  • git - Version control system
  • ca-certificates - SSL/TLS certificates
  • unzip - Archive extraction utility
  • jq - JSON processor
  • Certbot (SSL certificate management)

Installed as services

  • Docker CE from the official Docker repository
  • Postgres (official package from OS repository)
    • Ubuntu 22.04 - Postgres 14
  • Redis (official package from OS repository)
  • DollarDeploy Agent (DDAgent)

A note on Docker

Docker CE is installed and available on the server, but that does not mean your app runs inside Docker. Docker may be installed and available, but supported native applications do not run inside Docker and do not require Docker as their application runtime - they run directly as native systemd services. Docker Compose is there for the workloads that actually need containers.

Updated on Sep 20, 2026
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