How to Self-Host Huly in 2026: Docker Setup

What Huly Is

Huly (25K+ GitHub stars) is an all-in-one project management platform that combines what typically requires multiple separate tools:

• Issue tracking (Linear/Jira alternative): Projects, issues, sprints, roadmaps
• Docs and wikis (Notion alternative): Collaborative documents, structured knowledge base
• Team messaging (Slack alternative): Channels, direct messages, threading
• HR and processes: Team management, office hours, time tracking

Self-hosting Huly means all your team's project data, documents, and communication stays on your infrastructure. No per-seat SaaS fees for multiple tools.

What makes Huly different from alternatives: Most project management tools specialize. Huly is deliberately opinionated about being everything a development team needs in one place — you don't need separate subscriptions for issue tracking, docs, and chat.

Server Requirements

Huly is resource-heavy compared to simpler project management tools. This is because it bundles multiple services (database, search engine, real-time collaboration).

Minimum Requirements

• 2 vCPUs
• 4GB RAM
• 20GB storage

Recommended

• 4 vCPUs
• 8GB RAM
• 40GB storage

Recommended Servers (Hetzner)

Team Size	Server	RAM	Monthly
1-5 users	CPX21	4GB	$6.50
5-20 users	CPX31	8GB	$10
20+ users	CPX41	16GB	$19

Warning: Running Huly on less than 4GB RAM results in degraded performance and potential container crashes. If your server is at minimum spec, monitor memory usage closely.

Step 1: Prepare Your Server

# Update system packages
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

# Install Docker
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

# Verify Docker installation
docker --version
docker compose version

Step 2: Clone the Huly Self-Host Repository

Huly maintains a dedicated repository for self-hosting that contains the Docker Compose configuration and setup scripts.

git clone https://github.com/hcengineering/huly-selfhost.git
cd huly-selfhost

Step 3: Run the Setup Script

Huly's setup script generates your configuration files:

chmod +x setup.sh
./setup.sh

The script prompts you for:

• Host (domain or IP): Enter your domain (e.g., huly.yourdomain.com) or server IP
• HTTP port: Default 80 (or your preferred port)
• Port: Default 8083 for internal service

The script generates:

• huly.conf: Your configuration file with all settings
• nginx.conf: Nginx configuration for routing

After setup, verify huly.conf contains your correct settings:

cat huly.conf

Step 4: Configure Nginx

If Nginx is installed on your host (outside Docker):

sudo ln -s $(pwd)/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/huly.conf
sudo nginx -t
sudo systemctl reload nginx

If you're using Docker-based Nginx or Caddy as a reverse proxy, skip this step and configure your proxy manually (see Step 8).

Step 5: Start Huly

docker compose up -d

Huly starts several containers:

• mongodb: Document database (core data storage)
• elastic: Elasticsearch (full-text search)
• minio: S3-compatible file storage (document attachments)
• huly-front: Web frontend
• huly-account: Authentication and accounts service
• huly-collaboration: Real-time collaboration (CRDT)
• huly-transactor: Event processing
• huly-rekoni: Document processing
• nginx: Internal routing

Initial startup takes 3-10 minutes as Elasticsearch initializes and containers reach healthy state.

Monitor startup:

docker compose logs -f

Look for log entries indicating each service is ready. The elastic container takes the longest to initialize.

Step 6: Verify Services Are Running

docker compose ps

All containers should show "running" status. Common issues:

Elasticsearch failing: Likely an OS-level setting. Fix:

sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144
echo 'vm.max_map_count=262144' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf

Then restart: docker compose restart elastic

MongoDB failing: Check disk space (df -h). MongoDB needs sufficient free space to initialize.

Memory issues: If containers keep restarting, your server may not have enough RAM. Upgrade to a larger instance.

Step 7: Access Huly

Navigate to http://your-server-ip (or the domain you configured).

Create the First Account

The first account you create becomes the workspace owner. Register with:

• Your email address
• A strong password
• Your name

Initial Workspace Configuration

After logging in:

1. Create your first workspace: Give it your team or company name
2. Invite team members: Settings → Members → Invite
3. Create your first project: Projects → New Project

Step 8: Set Up HTTPS (Required for Team Use)

For team collaboration, HTTPS is essential — browsers block some real-time features on HTTP.

Option A: Caddy (Simplest)

Install Caddy on your host:

sudo apt install -y debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring apt-transport-https curl
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/gpg.key' | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/caddy-stable-archive-keyring.gpg
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/debian.deb.txt' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-stable.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install caddy

/etc/caddy/Caddyfile:

huly.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:80
}

sudo systemctl restart caddy

Caddy automatically handles SSL certificates via Let's Encrypt.

Option B: Nginx + Certbot on Host

If you installed Nginx on the host (from Step 4), add SSL:

sudo apt install -y certbot python3-certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx -d huly.yourdomain.com

Certbot automatically configures SSL and sets up auto-renewal.

Update Huly Configuration After HTTPS

After setting up HTTPS, run the setup script again with your HTTPS URL, or manually edit huly.conf:

# In huly.conf, update HOST to your domain
HOST=huly.yourdomain.com

Then restart:

docker compose up -d

Step 9: Configure Email (Optional)

Email is needed for:

• Invitation emails when adding team members
• Password reset
• Notifications

SMTP Configuration

Edit huly.conf to add SMTP settings:

SMTP_HOST=smtp.yourprovider.com
SMTP_PORT=587
SMTP_USER=your@email.com
SMTP_PASS=yourpassword
SMTP_SENDER=huly@yourdomain.com

Then restart the account service:

docker compose restart huly-account

Free SMTP options:

• Brevo (Sendinblue): 300 emails/day free
• Mailgun: 1,000 emails/month free for 3 months
• AWS SES: $0.10 per 1,000 emails after free tier

Step 10: Configure Audio/Video Calls (Optional)

Huly's audio and video calling runs on LiveKit infrastructure.

Option A: Use Huly's LiveKit (Easiest)

By default, Huly uses Huly's shared LiveKit infrastructure for calls. No configuration needed.

Option B: Self-Host LiveKit

For full data sovereignty or high usage:

1. Deploy LiveKit on a separate server:

# LiveKit Cloud alternative: self-host LiveKit OSS
docker run --rm -it \
  -p 7880:7880 \
  -p 7881:7881 \
  -p 7882:7882/udp \
  -v $PWD/livekit.yaml:/livekit.yaml \
  livekit/livekit-server \
  --config /livekit.yaml \
  --node-ip YOUR_SERVER_IP

2. Configure in huly.conf:

LIVEKIT_HOST=wss://livekit.yourdomain.com
LIVEKIT_API_KEY=your-api-key
LIVEKIT_API_SECRET=your-secret

Managing Your Huly Instance

Update Huly

Huly releases updates regularly:

cd huly-selfhost
git pull
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

Always check the release notes at github.com/hcengineering/huly-selfhost/releases before updating.

Backup

Huly stores data in Docker volumes. Back up:

MongoDB (all application data):

docker exec huly-mongodb-1 mongodump --out /backup/$(date +%Y%m%d)
docker cp huly-mongodb-1:/backup/$(date +%Y%m%d) /opt/backups/huly/

MinIO (file uploads):

# Use rclone to backup MinIO to S3
rclone sync minio-source:huly s3-remote:your-backup-bucket/huly

Elasticsearch (search indices): Can be rebuilt from MongoDB, so lower priority for backup.

Add Users

Team members are invited by email:

1. Settings → Members
2. Invite Member → Enter email
3. The invited user receives a link to set up their account

Huly for Teams: What to Configure First

Workspace Structure

1. Create Spaces for different team areas (Engineering, Design, Marketing)
2. Within each Space, create Projects for active work
3. Set up issue Categories and Priorities matching your workflow

Issue Tracking Workflow

Configure your team's workflow states:

• Settings → Classes → Issue → Add custom states

Default states: Todo → In Progress → Won't Fix / Cancelled → Done

Customize to match your team's workflow (e.g., add "In Review", "Blocked", "QA").

Communication

Huly's messaging replaces Slack for internal team communication:

• Channels: Team-wide announcements, engineering discussions
• Direct messages: Individual conversations
• Issue comments: Discussion anchored to specific issues

Cost Comparison

SaaS Equivalent Costs (Per Month, 10 Users)

Tool	Purpose	Monthly
Linear Business	Issue tracking	$160
Notion Team	Docs + wiki	$80
Slack Pro	Team messaging	$75
Total		$315/month

Huly Self-Hosted

Component	Monthly
Hetzner CPX31 (8GB)	$10
Domain + SSL	~$1
Total	$11/month

Annual savings: $315 × 12 - $11 × 12 = $3,648/year for a 10-person team.

The tradeoff is self-hosting operational overhead (updates, backups, monitoring). For most small teams, this is 1-2 hours per month.

Find More All-in-One Platforms

Why Self-Host Huly?

The case for self-hosting Huly comes down to three practical factors: data ownership, cost at scale, and operational control.

Data ownership is the fundamental argument. When you use a SaaS version of any tool, your data lives on someone else's infrastructure subject to their terms of service, their security practices, and their business continuity. If the vendor raises prices, gets acquired, changes API limits, or shuts down, you're left scrambling. Self-hosting Huly means your data and configuration stay on infrastructure you control — whether that's a VPS, a bare metal server, or a home lab.

Cost at scale matters once you move beyond individual use. Most SaaS equivalents charge per user or per data volume. A self-hosted instance on a $10-20/month VPS typically costs less than per-user SaaS pricing for teams of five or more — and the cost doesn't scale linearly with usage. One well-configured server handles dozens of users for a flat monthly fee.

Operational control is the third factor. The Docker Compose configuration above exposes every setting that commercial equivalents often hide behind enterprise plans: custom networking, environment variables, storage backends, and authentication integrations. You decide when to update, how to configure backups, and what access controls to apply.

The honest tradeoff: you're responsible for updates, backups, and availability. For teams running any production workloads, this is familiar territory. For individuals, the learning curve is real but the tooling (Docker, Caddy, automated backups) is well-documented and widely supported.

Server Requirements and Sizing

Before deploying Huly, assess your server capacity against expected workload.

Minimum viable setup: A 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with 20GB SSD is sufficient for personal use or small teams. Most consumer VPS providers — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr — offer machines in this range for $5-10/month. Hetzner offers excellent price-to-performance for European and US regions.

Recommended production setup: 2 vCPUs with 4GB RAM and 40GB SSD handles most medium deployments without resource contention. This gives Huly headroom for background tasks, caching, and concurrent users while leaving capacity for other services on the same host.

Storage planning: The Docker volumes in this docker-compose.yml store all persistent Huly data. Estimate your storage growth rate early — for data-intensive tools, budget for 3-5x your initial estimate. Hetzner Cloud and Vultr both support online volume resizing without stopping your instance.

Operating system: Any modern 64-bit Linux distribution works. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian 12 are the most commonly tested configurations. Ensure Docker Engine 24.0+ and Docker Compose v2 are installed — verify with docker --version and docker compose version. Avoid Docker Desktop on production Linux servers; it adds virtualization overhead and behaves differently from Docker Engine in ways that cause subtle networking issues.

Network: Only ports 80 and 443 need to be publicly accessible when running behind a reverse proxy. Internal service ports should be bound to localhost only. A minimal UFW firewall that blocks all inbound traffic except SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS is the single most effective security measure for a self-hosted server.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Running Huly without a tested backup strategy is an unacceptable availability risk. Docker volumes are not automatically backed up — if you delete a volume or the host fails, data is gone with no recovery path.

What to back up: The named Docker volumes containing Huly's data (database files, user uploads, application state), your docker-compose.yml and any customized configuration files, and .env files containing secrets.

Backup approach: For simple setups, stop the container, archive the volume contents, then restart. For production environments where stopping causes disruption, use filesystem snapshots or database dump commands (PostgreSQL pg_dump, SQLite .backup, MySQL mysqldump) that produce consistent backups without downtime.

For a complete automated backup workflow that ships snapshots to S3-compatible object storage, see the Restic + Rclone backup guide. Restic handles deduplication and encryption; Rclone handles multi-destination uploads. The same setup works for any Docker volume.

Backup cadence: Daily backups to remote storage are a reasonable baseline for actively used tools. Use a 30-day retention window minimum — long enough to recover from mistakes discovered weeks later. For critical data, extend to 90 days and use a secondary destination.

Restore testing: A backup that has never been restored is a backup you cannot trust. Once a month, restore your Huly backup to a separate Docker Compose stack on different ports and verify the data is intact. This catches silent backup failures, script errors, and volume permission issues before they matter in a real recovery.

Security Hardening

Self-hosting means you are responsible for Huly's security posture. The Docker Compose setup provides a functional base; production deployments need additional hardening.

Always use a reverse proxy: Never expose Huly's internal port directly to the internet. The docker-compose.yml binds to localhost; Caddy or Nginx provides HTTPS termination. Direct HTTP access transmits credentials in plaintext. A reverse proxy also centralizes TLS management, rate limiting, and access logging.

Strong credentials: Change default passwords immediately after first login. For secrets in docker-compose environment variables, generate random values with openssl rand -base64 32 rather than reusing existing passwords.

Firewall configuration:

ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw enable

Internal service ports (databases, admin panels, internal APIs) should only be reachable from localhost or the Docker network, never directly from the internet.

Network isolation: Docker Compose named networks keep Huly's services isolated from other containers on the same host. Database containers should not share networks with containers that don't need direct database access.

VPN access for sensitive services: For internal-only tools, restricting access to a VPN adds a strong second layer. Headscale is an open source Tailscale control server that puts your self-hosted stack behind a WireGuard mesh, eliminating public internet exposure for internal tools.

Update discipline: Subscribe to Huly's GitHub releases page to receive security advisory notifications. Schedule a monthly maintenance window to pull updated images. Running outdated container images is the most common cause of self-hosted service compromises.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Container exits immediately or won't start

Check logs first — they almost always explain the failure:

docker compose logs -f huly

Common causes: a missing required environment variable, a port already in use, or a volume permission error. Port conflicts appear as bind: address already in use. Find the conflicting process with ss -tlpn | grep PORT and either stop it or change Huly's port mapping in docker-compose.yml.

Cannot reach the web interface

Work through this checklist:

1. Confirm the container is running: docker compose ps
2. Test locally on the server: curl -I http://localhost:PORT
3. If local access works but external doesn't, check your firewall: ufw status
4. If using a reverse proxy, verify it's running and the config is valid: caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Permission errors on volume mounts

Some containers run as a non-root user. If the Docker volume is owned by root, the container process cannot write to it. Find the volume's host path with docker volume inspect VOLUME_NAME, check the tool's documentation for its expected UID, and apply correct ownership:

chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/docker/volumes/your_volume/_data

High resource usage over time

Memory or CPU growing continuously usually indicates unconfigured log rotation, an unbound cache, or accumulated data needing pruning. Check current usage with docker stats huly. Add resource limits in docker-compose.yml to prevent one container from starving others. For ongoing visibility into resource trends, deploy Prometheus + Grafana or Netdata.

Data disappears after container restart

Data stored in the container's writable layer — rather than a named volume — is lost when the container is removed or recreated. This happens when the volume mount path in docker-compose.yml doesn't match where the application writes data. Verify mount paths against the tool's documentation and correct the mapping. Named volumes persist across container removal; only docker compose down -v deletes them.

Keeping Huly Updated

Huly follows a regular release cadence. Staying current matters for security patches and compatibility. The update process with Docker Compose is straightforward:

docker compose pull          # Download updated images
docker compose up -d         # Restart with new images
docker image prune -f        # Remove old image layers (optional)

Read the changelog before major version updates. Some releases include database migrations or breaking configuration changes. For major version bumps, test in a staging environment first — run a copy of the service on different ports with the same volume data to validate the migration before touching production.

Version pinning: For stability, pin to a specific image tag in docker-compose.yml instead of latest. Update deliberately after reviewing the changelog. This trades automatic patch delivery for predictable behavior — the right call for business-critical services.

Post-update verification: After updating, confirm Huly is functioning correctly. Most services expose a /health endpoint that returns HTTP 200 — curl it from the server or monitor it with your uptime tool.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to self-host Huly?

The primary cost is your server. A Hetzner CAX11 (2 vCPU ARM, 4GB RAM) runs about $5/month — enough for Huly plus a few companion services. Add a domain ($12/year) and you're under $75/year for a complete self-hosted deployment. Compare that to SaaS pricing that typically starts at $5-15/user/month.

Can I run Huly alongside other self-hosted services?

Yes. The docker-compose.yml above isolates Huly on its own named Docker network. As long as your server has sufficient RAM and disk — 4GB RAM and 20GB disk handles most combinations — running multiple self-hosted services on one VPS is practical and common.

How do I migrate Huly to a new server?

Stop the container, export the Docker volumes, transfer to the new server, restore the volumes, and update your DNS. Most migrations complete in under an hour. Test the restoration before decommissioning the old server.

What happens if Huly releases a breaking update?

Pin your docker-compose.yml to a specific image tag instead of latest. Subscribe to the GitHub releases page for advance notice. When ready to upgrade, read the release notes, back up first, test on staging, then update production.

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