Prepare the server

Five minutes of prep saves an hour of debugging later.

Pick a VPS

A small Linux box. Ubuntu 22.04+ or Debian 12+ is the most-tested path; any systemd distro works.

Workload	vCPU	RAM	Disk
1-3 small apps, hobby	1	1 GB (min)	20 GB
5-10 apps, small team	2	2 GB (recommended)	40 GB
10-20 apps, busy	2-4	4 GB	80 GB+

SimpleDeploy itself uses ~60 MB RAM. Everything else is your apps and Docker.

Install Docker

SimpleDeploy needs Docker Engine + the Compose plugin. Skip this if Docker is already running.

# Official one-liner (verify on docs.docker.com first)
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sudo sh
sudo systemctl enable --now docker
docker version
docker compose version

On Ubuntu 22.04+, `apt install docker.io docker-compose-v2` also works.

Open the firewall

You need three ports inbound: 22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP, Let’s Encrypt), 443 (HTTPS).

sudo ufw allow 22/tcp
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw allow 443/tcp
sudo ufw enable

If your provider has a separate cloud firewall (AWS Security Group, Hetzner, DO), open the same ports there.

Set up DNS

Point an A record for the management domain at the server, e.g. manage.example.com.

For each app you plan to deploy, add an A record for its domain too. Wildcard records (*.example.com) work and save you a step.

1. In your DNS provider, create:

   • manage.example.com → 203.0.113.10 (your VPS IP)
   • whoami.example.com → 203.0.113.10

2. Verify propagation:

   dig +short manage.example.com

   You should see your VPS IP.

Ready? On to generating the config.