Coolify still requires root for installation, though they have a branch that doesn't that they're working on.

So you can just ssh in and do the coolify install and then switch off root login I guess, if you're willing to just blow away the server and start over if you ever needed to ssh in again.

I tried a from scratch coolify deploy recently and it kept failing with ssh key errors. On the other server we have it working and deploying many projects however the "just give it a docker compose" method has never worked for us.