Activity

Background

After troubleshooting a severe disk usage issue (81% disk usage, 30GB log file from 288,630 errors over 10 months), we've identified critical best practices for Laravel apps deployed on Coolify.

Recommended Best Practices

🔄 Log Configuration for New Laravel Apps

When deploying Laravel applications on Coolify, always configure these environment variables:

LOG_STACK=daily
LOG_DAILY_MAX_FILES=7
CACHE_STORE=redis  # NOT database

Why:

• LOG_STACK=daily creates daily log files instead of a single ever-growing file
• LOG_DAILY_MAX_FILES=7 automatically deletes logs older than 7 days
• CACHE_STORE=redis prevents stale database references and improves performance

🧹 Regular Maintenance

Monthly Tasks:

• Review and remove old deployments in Coolify UI
  • Old deployment images accumulate and can consume significant disk space
  • Coolify keeps previous deployment images unless manually removed
  • Check: Applications → Deployments → Delete old deployments

What we found:

• 85% of Docker images were unused old deployments
• Build cache accumulated to 1.75GB
• Old deployment images totaled 12GB+

📊 Monitoring

Consider adding:

• Automated log rotation scripts for emergency cleanup
• Monitoring for log files exceeding size thresholds
• Regular docker system prune schedules

Feature Requests

For Coolify Platform

1. Default Laravel Environment Variables

   • Pre-populate LOG_STACK=daily and LOG_DAILY_MAX_FILES=7 for Laravel apps
   • Warn when CACHE_STORE=database is detected

2. Deployment Cleanup

   • Add option to auto-delete deployments older than N days
   • Show deployment disk usage in UI
   • One-click cleanup for old deployment images

3. Log Management

   • Built-in log rotation for application containers
   • Alert when application logs exceed size threshold
   • Log size monitoring in application metrics

References

This issue documents lessons learned from a production incident where:

• Single laravel.log file grew to 30GB
• Server reached 81% disk usage
• 288,630 database connection errors logged over 10 months
• Issue went unnoticed due to lack of application-level log monitoring

Action Items

• Document these best practices in README/docs
• Create deployment template with recommended settings
• Add pre-deployment checklist
• Consider Coolify feature requests for auto-cleanup

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Impact: Following these practices can prevent critical disk space issues and improve application performance.