Huly: replace Linear, Notion and Slack on your VPS

Why consolidate issues, docs and chat into one tool

What Huly consolidates in your infrastructure

• Issues and sprints — create tickets, organise them into sprints and roadmaps with built-in Kanban boards, all without leaving the application.
• Wiki and documentation — write structured pages directly in Huly; docs are versioned and linked to the relevant projects.
• Real-time chat — channel and thread-based messaging with built-in video calls, replacing Slack without an additional subscription.
• Bidirectional GitHub sync — Huly issues are mirrored in GitHub and vice-versa; GitHub pull requests appear automatically in their linked issues.
• Time tracking — log time spent on each issue directly from the interface, with no third-party extension needed.

Exact requirements: what Huly actually consumes

Deploy Huly on a VPS in five steps

1. 01

   Clone the official repository

   Fetch the configuration from the public repository: git clone https://github.com/hcengineering/huly-selfhost.git && cd huly-selfhost. The repository includes compose.yml and the setup.sh script, which generates the nginx configuration and .env file automatically.

2. 02

   Run the setup script

   Run ./setup.sh and enter your subdomain address (e.g. huly.example.com). The script generates huly_v7.conf containing the version (HULY_VERSION), JWT secrets, MinIO credentials and volume paths. Enable the nginx configuration with sudo ln -s $(pwd)/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/huly.conf && sudo nginx -s reload.

3. 03

   Start the services with Docker Compose

   Bring up the full stack with docker compose up -d. On first start, Elasticsearch and CockroachDB initialise their data stores; allow two to three minutes before the interface becomes available. Check container status with docker compose ps — all services should show as running.

4. 04

   Configure the HTTPS reverse proxy

   The setup.sh script already generates an nginx configuration with TLS. If you use Caddy or Traefik, point the reverse proxy to the internal port of the front service (default 8083). Make sure WebSockets are correctly proxied via the Upgrade and Connection headers — without them, real-time messaging and video calls will not work.

5. 05

   Create the first workspace and invite your team

   Open your subdomain in a browser, create an administrator account, then generate your first workspace. From the workspace settings, send email invitations to your team members. No seats are counted: you only pay for the storage and bandwidth consumed on your VPS.

Post-installation: backup, monitoring and version updates

Set up backup, monitoring and updates

1. 06

   Automate backups

   The repository ships two ready-to-use scripts: backup-create.sh and backup-restore.sh. Run ./backup-create.sh from the huly-selfhost folder to archive all volumes (CockroachDB, Elasticsearch, MinIO). Schedule the script via cron — for example 0 3 * * * /opt/huly-selfhost/backup-create.sh >> /var/log/huly-backup.log 2>&1 for a daily backup at 3 am. Store archives off the VPS (S3, Hetzner bucket or a remote disk). For major migrations (e.g. v0.6.x → v0.7.x), always consult MIGRATION.md before restoring.

2. 07

   Monitor container health

   Set up a simple alert by running docker compose ps in a cron job every five minutes, or deploy a lightweight tool such as Uptime Kuma (itself available as a self-hosted app on the same VPS). Prioritise monitoring the account, transactor and elasticsearch services — these are responsible for the most visible failures. Logs for each service are available via docker compose logs -f <service-name>.

3. 08

   Update to a new version

   Before each update, read MIGRATION.md for the target version. If the section says "No changes required", the procedure is straightforward: edit HULY_VERSION in huly_v7.conf with the new tag (e.g. v0.7.426), then run git pull && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d. For a major upgrade (0.6.x → 0.7.x), follow the documented migration steps carefully, especially around section v0.7.204 — a direct in-place upgrade locks MongoDB data in a way that is difficult to reverse.

Troubleshooting: four common errors and their fixes

Common errors and fixes

• Sign-up fails silently when creating an account. Likely cause: the account service is unreachable or misconfigured. Check its logs with docker compose logs -f account — a callback URL error or a connection problem to CockroachDB will appear clearly. Make sure HULY_HOST in your configuration exactly matches the published subdomain.
• Elasticsearch does not start (exit code 137 or OOMKilled). Cause: insufficient memory. Elasticsearch requires at least 4 GB of RAM for itself at startup. If your VPS is running low, add ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms1g -Xmx1g to the environment section of the elasticsearch service in compose.yml to cap its Java heap at 1 GB — at the cost of some search performance.
• MinIO inaccessible — attachments fail to load. Cause: volume permission issues or an internal DNS resolution problem between containers. Check that the minio service is in a running state with docker compose ps. If uploaded files disappear after a restart, verify that the volume path in huly_v7.conf is a valid absolute path on the host, and that permissions are correct (chown -R 1000:1000 /var/huly/files).
• WebSockets not working — messaging and video calls are frozen. Cause: the reverse proxy is not forwarding Upgrade: websocket and Connection: Upgrade headers. In nginx, add explicitly proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade"; inside the location block. With Caddy, the reverse_proxy directive handles WebSockets automatically in recent versions.

Which teams does Huly suit best?

Huly vs Linear + Notion + Slack: what you gain and what you take on

Scroll the table