Cancel Make.com, n8n, Zapier?!🤖 Trigger.Dev Self-Hosted (Coolify) Guide Open-Source Automation Jobs

What's going on everybody Josh pokok here and in today's video we're going to be looking at the open-source alternative to tools like n8n make.com zapier as well as potentially even Amazon uh AWS Lambda this tool is called trigger. deev it's open-source background jobs with no timeouts all right we're going to dive into it show you how you can self-host this and show you how it compares to all those tools I mentioned where its strengths and weaknesses lie and how you can

Start using it today let's dive right into [Music] it all right guys so trigger dodev verse Alternatives plus I'm going to show you how to self-host it now you can self-host it in many different ways I'm going to show you how to do this with kifi uh using traffic and I'm going to show you how to do all that so what's going to be covered in today's video so we're going to talk about what is trigger how it compares to the

Other tools then of course how to install trigger now this video may be a bit longer I'm going to try to speed run through specific parts and get straight to the point so you guys can get the most value out of this but I'm also going to include timestamps so you can also watch on 1.5 to two times speed if needed in some areas like I would maybe suggest that when we're going through the uh comparison just because that's you're just

Getting a sense of how it compares to the other tools but then maybe slow it down a bit once we start getting into the more technical Parts such as the install process and just a disclaimer I'm just starting to implement this tool um I'm very excited about this tool trigger and plan to make a lot more videos around it so subscribe to make sure to stay tuned for that if you want to stay up to date there isn't too too many

Videos talking about this and showing you guys real life use cases but I'm also still learning about it and if I miss anything if you guys are some trigger experts or if you may see something that I leave out then definitely leave it in the comments down below to help out myself as well as others who are watching this okay so with Ado let's dive into the comparison so trigger versus n make.com zapier AWS Lambda all right so some of these

Tools are you may say they're a little bit different like you know NN for those of you who've been following this channel for a while I've done many videos on NN I've said how I love n and NN is way better and it's just better than make.com or zapier zapier um zapier I mean yeah they're just completely charging you for really minimal features make.com is better but it's still clunky and it's harder to do things nadn is better than make.com and

There's also op Source it's a little bit more technical I guess but it's really not it's once you actually learn it it's um it's better than make and you can do more stuff but there is a few bottlenecks that I have found with n and then um yeah I'm I have included AWS Lambda here because I know a lot of people use it as well as now trigger dodev so um we'll go ahead and just go through this chart real quick

I'm not going to read everything uh line by line but I'm just going to skim through it so you get a sense of how it Compares so uh trigger open source yes and is open source the other ones aren't ease of use with trigger I'd say like medium to I guess some people may consider low because you're going to have to have a bit of coding knowledge or at least develop a bit of coding knowledge n uh the benefit with that

Is it's it's the best no code one I found um and then make.com no code so it's uh pretty medium again uh I'd say these two are a little bit easier than trigger and then zapier is very easy but it's I mean to some extent but it's you know it's not that good and then AWS um e of used not not as uh not as easy as these other ones and then integration capabilities very high um with trigger and then oh

So now actually I would say uh about this now integration capability is pretty high with almost all of these I guess but and we'll show you that in just a second on the trigger website uh but you have more customization with stuff like trigger um so customization options high nadn it's still lower than trigger I would say in terms of building out flows and whatnot um but yeah also too guys just so you know lot like I did use AI to

Help me with this chart here so this chart isn't like a th% accurate that's why I'm giving you guys a little bit of my opinion as I'm reading this but this is like a general sense and guys this whole document which is a step-by-step sop on how to install trigger which we're going to go through in just a second is going to be linked down in the description below for 100% free you can just D go get access to this document

So you can see the comparison as well as you can see the stepbystep download instructions okay um so yeah uh suitable user base so trigger it's more suitable for developers but one thing I want to say I just want to do a quick disclaimer guys and um yeah so if you're like okay I don't know about code maybe if you're very like not techsavvy at all maybe you want to use something like n8n check out my n videos I'll maybe leave

Some link down below showing you how to self host them or you can use nad's cloud version but honestly I would recommend self-hosting it it's really not that difficult um but also too guys I want to say this we are in the a crazy time right now this it's never been easier to one learn new skills or two just yeah to basically learn new skills right if you don't know anything about code you could really learn a lot right now and

You could start developing this skill over time even if it's slow small steps day by day it's it's never been easier because right now you essentially have a full-time 247 expert at almost every single topic that you can ask every little Nuance question to about literally any stupid question right that you can't just have a human there to always assist you for and you can you know explain your uh your your situation your context and everything and it will tell you

Exactly how to solve a problem or how to think about it and of course I'm talking about AI so Claude TBT perplexity whatever the case may be so um yeah even if you're not like a developer or coder first off trigger isn't too too difficult to learn um from at least from obviously like I said I'm still learning it and whatnot but just from you know I know I kind of get a sense of what it you know what to do

With it and and how to use it and it's not like rocket science by any means okay it's mainly just you got to know maybe a little bit of typescript JavaScript um a little bit about code Etc and that that that you may be saying oh that's a lot trust me if you dedicate like a month two months you're going to start picking it up um over time okay so that's what I just want to say and anyways so and end

Somewhat technical users make.com zapier a little bit more General users and then Lambda developers and then best for development automation n Advanced workflows these two simple workflows Lambda backend Services coding flexibility High um NAD I'd say more medium Yeah medium um cuz it's not as flexible as trigger and then these two a little bit more limited uh zapier I'd say more limited even than make um Lambda very high and then pricing model now they like I said they have open source

So we'll get into that in just a second um okay I'm just going to skim through some of this cuz yeah you can just read the the chart on your own I just don't want to go through the whole thing scalability High very high with Lambda medium medium so essentially what I the point is trigger has more advanced features it has a little bit more of a learning curve than these other ones and uh yeah and we're going to take a

Quick look before so B here I'll just finish this so based on the comparison zapier is the most limited uh for of customization and coding flexibility no excels for non-technical users make.com offers a balance between easy use and capabilities but lacks the open source Advantage n a provides strong open source option and good customization and integration cap uh capabilities suitable for more technical users ad AWS Lambda Lambda offers the highest level of coding flexibility and scalability but requires significant technical expertise

And I believe it's more it's a lot more expensive um and then trigger. DAV stands out for open source solution that combines EAS of use with powerful development focused features making it particularly attractive for developers who want both flexibility and simplicity okay so now I'm just going to quickly take a look at the website here and uh then we're going to get into the self-hosted install Okay so the reason I'm looking at the website is one the UI is really nice

Not that that fully matters but um yeah you're going to get a sense of a few things that this can do so like here's like different examples of T like how you would set up a task within trig or like a uh to execute a task within trigger so like like AI task video processing task so chbe a video using deep gram all right so it's written right here in uh typescript and then cron jobs so air table to sync air

Table to the database weight right here workflows concurrency retries PDF to images semantic search AI agents so really cool stuff um trusted by developers at these companies app Smith too cal.com Verizon how it works I'm not going to you know SC go through everything line by line but deploy and scale to any size write simple reliable code um there's a few things I want to kind of highlight down here so um yeah you can take a look at the website link

Will be down below working with your existing Stacks so it works with many different Stacks so love by different developers you can see all the different testimonials or things people are saying about uh trigger. Dev so we have I believe this is um one of the so yeah this is someone at super base we've I've seen a lot of different people saying really good things you know I think they're backed by super base one of their um yeah SP yeah backed

By the world's best investors Founders and operators so why combinator super base um these other ones right here and then so yeah that's pretty much it guys uh and also too I'll leave a link to the docs in the description down below too let's go ahead and start with the install Okay so to self host it we going to need a VPS I use I'm using contabo but I mean you can really use anyone so check the self hosting docks which

Are right here you can access it either in the description down below or just go to this doc everything's within this Doc and they mention specific uh requirements and they suggest Debian for the VPS um so if you go to the docks here this is about self-hosting so they recommend requirements for CPU 8 GB Ram Debian or deriva uh derivative and then optional separate machine for working components so we're just going to be doing there's uh different ways to install you

Could do single server or multiple different servers servers slit Services we're going to do one uh one server and yeah there's other ways they talk about it here using enrock all this stuff I'm going to show you a very like kind of simple way basic way to do it um but yeah so uh you're going to want to point your domain that you're going to want to use for trigger at the VPS so whatever your IP is go into like Cloud

Flare which I'm using and point those dns's to um the IP address I'm not going to explain you how to do this I mean you should know how to do this if you don't know just ask chat gpg or Claude how to point a domain to uh DNS to a VPS IP um and then yeah so do that and then keep in mind that you can also use trigger Cloud if this is too difficult for you to self host or whatnot

Um then you can use trigger Cloud but like I said this is an exact sop on how to do it so if you just follow these steps you should have no problem if you have any questions let me know in the description down below and I'll do my best to help you all right so once you have your VPS you're going to want to SSH into it and then you're going to want to decide where you want to clone the repo

So I just going to clone it right here well I actually already did it so I'm just going to show you exactly what to do so you're going to want to run this get clone dasb and then V3 because we're going to be doing the V3 banch the vers version three branch of their uh GitHub repo right here you can go check out the GitHub repo 2 it has some uh some explanation on how to do everything here too as well

Um and yeah see if we go to V3 this is the repo we're going to be using the version 3 not the main branch okay and then once you clone it you're going to CD into the docker file which is the directory and then you're going to okay you don't have to do this because um yeah you don't have to do that I believe since we already are specifying the branch right here and then uh we're going you're going to want

To run/ start.sh and this is going to start the installation scripts and it's going to prompt you like um basically just say yes to all the different prompts it's going to ask you if it wants to create a environment variable file and you're going to want to say yes and it's going to ask you a couple more questions just basically like it's pretty standard questions okay and once you do that um so like if I go if I go LS here

You'll see this is what the repo looks like we have the start.sh what we what we just ran and then uh actually if I go LS do- a we're going to see all the files so you can see this EnV file that was created you're going to want to go Nano and then EnV all right this is going to open up this environment variable file now I'm not going to do that because I have my um I have my information in

There but this is the environment variable file so it's going to look something like this by default okay so you're pretty much you're going to have all of this in your environment variable file this is the default one uh the one the stuff that is highlighted in black and dark uh bold is what you're going to want to do right so I'm not going to go through all this and there are some things too like you can uncomment out if you

If you actually know what you're doing and you want those like you actually don't even need this one right here but um I'm just going to leave it there you can comment this out if you don't want it I just put it there um you can read the comment right here what it's about and then this right here this is the off for GitHub so you're going to want want a GitHub account and you're going to want to go to GitHub

Okay so you're going to come up here to your GitHub in your picture right here you're going to click that then you're going to click on settings and then you're going to scroll the way down and there's going to be something that says developer settings you're going to want to click on that it's going to take you here and I'll leave this link in the description to it's github.com settings developers then you're going to want to click on o off apps

And you're you're going to want to create a new ooff app okay so this is the O off app you're going to want to scroll all the way down and this is how you're going to want the uh the setup to look like for the homepage URL this is the domain that you're pointing towards your uh towards your VPS that you're going to be using for trigger so I'm just putting domain.com as it just showing you guys and then for the

Authorization callback URL you're going to want to use your domain whatever it is uh subdomain dod.com and then slof SLG back GitHub SL callback okay and I'll leave that in the I'll leave this in the documentation as well so you can uh see it okay and then when you're in here within your GitHub app you're going to see client ID this is the client ID right below here where you're going to want to copy that and then you're going to want

To generate a new secret okay those are the two keys that you're going to put in your environment variables the secret as well as the client ID So within the document I added the direct link where you go to GitHub right here to your settings and developers to create the app and then I just G gave you a reference here homepage URL will be your domain and then the authorization call back URL will be your domain SL this okay so I

Hope that makes sense so like I said you're going to add your off GitHub client ID right here and then your secret right here where the X's are this is optional you technically don't need this but um yeah you can use this if you want to get like emails and stuff uh emails working um they use resend which is really good for uh sending within nextjs so res.com I'll leave a link down below if you want to use that you can

Sign up you can get your domain um you can set up your domain verification within resend and then you just add whatever email that you're using to send from reply email and then your resent API key now this isn't uh mandatory but yeah so if once you set everything up you can sign in through GitHub off you can it says you can also sign in through uh Magic Link email I was having some issues with it I may have fixed it

Though I didn't test that part out though but um yeah if you're having issues with the magic link then just use the GitHub off and um and yeah yeah so if you're if you're you trying through magic link though um if you don't have recent setup it will send the code in the terminal um but yeah and if you set up resend it will send it to your email so you can test out the link if you want but I I'm

Using the GitHub at the moment right that maybe I'll change that or try it out whatever but anyways that that's like that's neither here nor there anyways so here this now it's going to generate you like I said when you run that uh in setup script it's going to automatically generate you your uh op SSL Rand text Keys your magic link key session uh secret your encryption key your provider secret your coordinator secret I would save these somewhere just so you

Have them just just in case and then everything else is pretty much uh the same except for you're going to want to for your trigger protocol make sure you uncomment uh so when these things that I'm piloting bold they may have a hashtag in front of them uh you're going to want to remove that um so that they're uncommented and then you're going to yeah this is trigger protocol https and then your trigger domain is that same domain this is the

Same domain it has to be the same domain that you're using in your GitHub off and all that good stuff okay once you do that you need to connect traffic okay so like okay so you can use the reason I'm saying coolify and traffic is because I've done videos on coolify if you don't know about coolify you could use you don't need to use coolify and you could use just a reverse proxy to uh link up your domain to uh trigger

You could use anything but I'm going to show you with kify okay so I'm not going to explain the others but with kify it's actually very easy to set up you just go to kfi.com I've done video orio I've done many videos on this you literally just run this one command and it will set this up on your server so it's like self-hosted on your server now you may be asking if you have kify hey Josh well doesn't kify have its

Own trigger uh app now yes that is true and you can try just installing coolify and he'll see Trigger right here trigger and then trigger with external dat database now I was trying around with this I didn't fully like spend hours trying to do this but I did see the one of the founders in Discord mentioning that it's not the official way and it has some bugs and stuff so I just didn't do it that way you can try it and

See if it works um I I think I did it and I was having some issues signing in but I don't know if you want to try that you can try it but uh I know this way that I'm showing you is a Surefire way it works but anyways so this is what your coolify will look like once you get it set up now kify uses traffic by default I'm not um yeah if you're not familiar with traffic it's does like

Reverse proxies and whatnot so so now I'm going to show you how to set it up with traffic coolify and the reverse proxy so you can get your domain Point uh you know hosted with uh hosting the trigger okay uh trigger dodev so what you're going to need to do is now you can do this either through the command line or through painer um I like using painer sometimes but I'm going to uh show you both ways so the command line

Method is you're going to want to run the following command so so start so yeah once you run this this right here and you got your environment variables good now if you just one thing too guys if you change your environment variables and the docker containers are already up you're going to have to restart that so Docker compose down Docker compose up to adjust those environment variables okay so this Fallen Command right here if you run it in your command line

It's Docker Network connect Docker web app and then coolify Das proxy so kify Das proxy once you have kify spun up this is the container for kifi traffic um service so what we're doing here is we're connecting kify proxy AKA traffic to Docker web app and Docker web app is the network of uh trigger okay so this is the network of the trigger uh web app okay so what you need to do is um this is going to add traffic to

That same network and this is like a mandatory step and then this command tells Docker to connect the container named coolify proxy to the network Docker web app if you want to verify that the container has been successfully added to your network you can use the following command to inspect the network and that would be Docker Network inspect Docker web app so if you run this it's going to show all the different containers that are connected to that Network and you

Should see the coolify proxy there okay you can also do this in painer I'm not going to like show you exactly how to do that right now because honestly this if you don't have painer already set up this way is going to be quicker um but I do like having I do like painer so it's definitely if you don't have painer it's definitely a cool app I would suggest checking out but uh this is how to do it with painer you

Just go to coolify proxy container within your painer and scroll all the way down to the bottom and then you can just use a gooey to join this specific Network and you're obviously going to want to join the docker _ web app Network which is the trigger Network okay now if you just do this and then you restart your proxy server on uh on kify it's going to be disconnected from trigger Okay the reason being is because we're going to have

To actually change the coolify traffic config file first okay so so if I'm in my coolify and I click on servers then I'm going to see my Local Host you're going to click on that or whatever server you're using cuz you have multiple servers connected to kify you're going to want to click on proxy okay now once you click on proxy you're going to see configuration all right so this is what it's going to look like you're going to see the

Config file and this is what you're going to want to edit okay so make sure you don't click reset configuration to default unless you like mess something up and you don't have anything here that matters but uh whenever you save it the save buttons up here just says a little side note but this is uh a templated version of my config file and the main stuff that you're going to want to change is what I highlighted in bold okay so what

We're doing here under networks is we're adding the docker web app right here and we're putting external as true okay so you can add that in and then what we're doing under networks over here is you'll see there's coolify there's coolify up here we're adding Docker web app okay so those are the two main changes that we're doing um all this other stuff uh you should be good you don't don't even probably need to do any of this but if you

Are encountering issues so like I said here go to server select your server click on proxy edit the config file the bolded lines in the example config below you don't need to copy my whole config but the Bold items mainly now like I said I believe the kify trffic config file by default has everything set up correctly for let's encrypt but if you're having any issues you can copy some of the other command SL labels from the config file below if

Needed um I'm not going to go over all these labels and config files but I do have some specific ones here too just as a side note I'm not going to cover this in this video cuz it would be an whole other topic but I do have the labels here and commands for if you want to set up the dashboard for traffic and view that but don't worry about that unless you know what you're doing you could maybe check that out

And just copy some of this you would need to change this of course anyways the next step is you're going to go to Dynamic configurations and click add and then you're going to add the config file below and change the the for your domain name of course so so like I said if you go to Dynamic configurations you click on ADD you could just name this trigger uh trigger. yaml and then you could literally just copy this and paste it over

But like I said you're going to want to change these two uh bold items right here which is your domain to the same domain that you're using everywhere else that trigger domain that's in your GitHub off all that good stuff okay from that point on um you can go ahead save this and you can go ahead and click on restart proxy now if you have your domain linked to your coolify say if you have like a custom domain for coolify sometimes

When you restart the proxy it actually like stops it and then you if like if you stop the proy you can't access it through the custom domain so if it does do that go to your IP address colon and then um whatever Port you're using for coolify I Believe by default it's Port 8,000 yeah it's Port 800 000 and then you'll be able to restart it um restart the proxy okay so just to confirm one more time you've cloned the repo

You've changed your environment variables you uh ran the setup tool to get everything uh the containers ready with um tra uh trigger and then you connected the um the coolify uh container to the trigger Network and then you basically you change the config file in your coolify traffic your main one by just adding the networks right here and then you added a custom Dynamic configuration which is just for traffic and you change the URLs right here this right here is pointing

To the internal port for traffic and then once you restart the proxy you should be good to go you should have your traffic set up here it's going to look like something like this once you start it's not you're not going to see this when you go to task it's going to look like it's going to look like this when you first set everything up I'm on the cloud version right now just so I can show you guys but under task

Is going to say get set up in 3 minutes so you can run the CLI in it command in your project so what you can do is you can use trigger with remix you can use it with node.js you can use it with nextjs so for this example I would just use nextjs I like nextjs at the moment um I know open AI just switched to from nextjs to remix those so uh interesting stuff there um anyway so yeah for nextjs

You could just uh npx uh create NE next app at latest answer all these questions I would suggest using typescript and once you do that I'll show you kind of an example uh this is a new project I just created right here so it's the we using the source file um I actually already initialized trigger but all I did to do that was I just simply ran I just simply ran this I did PMP DLX trigger do DLX trigger. DAV blah

Blah blah blah blah I ran this and after I was done running that I ran the CLI Dev Command right here again and then it's going to um once you run the first one it's going to ask you a couple questions it's going to ask if they it wants to add uh an example um task right here which it did just as a very simple hello world task and then if you run this right here here it's going to actually um

Be able to you'll actually start to see that task within trigger you'll see that task right here within trigger so here's the hello world task as you can see and uh yeah like I said guys I'm going to do more videos actually showing you building things with trigger all right this video is mainly just to introduce you to trigger as well as show you how it's kind of or like explain to you how it's kind of different from some of the

Other tools all right and as well show you how to install it all right the reason I'm not showing you everything else is because this video is already long don't want to make it too too long so if you're new to the channel make sure to smash that like button smash that subscribe button to stay up to date with the daily videos we upload videos every single day on AI automation business growth automations workflows still I'll do more videos on N

I still will continue using n for certain things um and Trigger for certain things but yeah guys let me know what your thoughts are in the comments down below what's your favorite automation tool is it n8n is it make.com is it zapier is it is it trigger are you trigger user do you have like if you know anything about Trigger or if you think I missed something that's important let me know in the comments down below always um you know always

Want to be improving the content and making sure everyone else is getting all the important information here so let's start some discussion down below if you see anyone asking questions maybe you know the answer to I'll do my best to try to help you guys out and if anyone else knows the answer then you guys can uh add your two cents in as well guys and uh yeah thank you guys so much for the recent 5,000 subscriber uh goal six th000

Subscribers is on the way next and then of course 10,000 subscribers so appreciate all the uh recent support guys and just like I like I said before the full document soop of me going of every single thing to install this is in the description down below 100% for free so you can check out this doc get access to it and all that good stuff and uh I have a link here to our free community our free Discord Channel our free Facebook

Group so you can go check this out stri community.com and like I said if you got any of out here then just uh leave a like And subscribe it's free other than that guys hope you enjoyed this video I will see you in tomorrow's video guys keep hustling keep grinding and of course guys accelerate your stride take care