Production Guide: Deploy Budibase with Docker Compose + Caddy + CouchDB + Redis + MinIO on Ubuntu

Internal tools are the backbone of every operations team, yet most organizations either buy expensive SaaS platforms that charge per-user premiums, or they assign engineering sprints to build bespoke admin panels from scratch. Budibase is an open-source low-code platform that lets non-developers design data-driven applications with a visual builder while giving engineers full control over hosting, authentication, and data custody. It connects to PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, REST APIs, and Google Sheets, then generates reactive web apps with role-based access control, automation triggers, and customizable themes.

This guide deploys Budibase on Ubuntu with Docker Compose, Caddy for automatic HTTPS, CouchDB for application definitions and user metadata, Redis for caching and job queuing, and MinIO for object storage. By the end, you will have a production-ready low-code platform accessible at a public domain, with persistent data volumes, health checks, secure secrets handling, and a backup strategy that covers both the document store and the object storage layer.

Running Budibase on your own infrastructure means you retain full ownership of application schemas, user directories, audit logs, and file attachments. You avoid per-seat licensing, can enforce network-level isolation, and integrate directly with your existing identity provider without routing credentials through a third-party cloud.

Architecture and flow overview

Caddy sits at the edge and terminates TLS with automatically managed Let's Encrypt certificates. It reverse-proxies HTTPS traffic to the Budibase app container on its internal HTTP port. The app container serves the React frontend and the REST API, persists application definitions, screen layouts, datasource configurations, and user accounts in CouchDB, and enqueues background automation jobs in Redis. The worker container polls Redis for pending jobs, executes automation steps, handles data source queries, and writes results back to CouchDB. MinIO stores file attachments, CSV imports, template exports, and generated PDFs.

Edge: Caddy with automatic TLS and HTTP/2
App: Budibase apps container (frontend + API)
Worker: Budibase worker container (background jobs)
State: CouchDB for documents, Redis for queues, MinIO for objects
Control: Docker Compose with restart policies and health checks
Ops: Backup workflow covering CouchDB dumps and MinIO buckets

All services except Caddy remain inside an isolated Docker bridge network. CouchDB and Redis are unreachable from the public internet because they do not publish host ports. The app and worker containers share an internal network segment with the database and object storage, while Caddy is the only service bound to the host's public interfaces.

Prerequisites

Linux VM or server with Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 and sudo access
Docker Engine 24.x or newer with the Compose plugin
A DNS A record pointing your Budibase domain to the server IP
Firewall rules allowing TCP 22 (SSH) and TCP 443 (HTTPS)
Password manager entry for the initial admin credentials
Named owner assigned for platform operations and upgrades

Step-by-step deployment

1) Create directories and permissions

Use a fixed directory layout so runbooks, backup scripts, and monitoring checks reference the same paths every time.

sudo mkdir -p /opt/budibase/{compose,backups,plugins}
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/budibase-couchdb
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/budibase-minio
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/budibase-redis
sudo chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/budibase-couchdb
sudo chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/budibase-minio
sudo chown -R 999:999 /var/lib/budibase-redis
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /opt/budibase