n8n + Chatbot on Coolify
building a personal AI stack on a thirty-euro server
Two phases, shipped.
Phase one: a VPS on Contabo, Ubuntu 24.04, hardened with the usual suspects — fail2ban, UFW, Tailscale as the only way in. Coolify 4 on top, Traefik handling TLS via Let’s Encrypt, n8n running next to its own Postgres and Redis. The first workflow fired end-to-end and the whole thing cost less than a streaming subscription.
Phase two: LibreChat v0.8 bolted to the same stack at chat.gabi.tv, talking to models through OpenRouter, with MCPs exposed as tools I actually use. A private, self-hosted chatbot that knows about my things, runs on hardware I can kick, and doesn’t ship my conversations to anyone else’s analytics pipeline.
This Linear project is closed. The stack is not finished — it never is — but the part that was scoped got built. Day-to-day operations and extensions continue in Personal AI Stack — operations.