How to Self-Host Socipub with Docker: Complete 2026 Guide

Most open source schedulers advertise self-hosting, then bury you in docs written for their own engineering team. Socipub's README assumes you already know how to glue Next.js, Supabase, and OAuth together — so this guide works from the repository itself: the four migrations, the environment variables, and the API route that actually delivers scheduled posts. Everything below is checked against the code, nothing invented.

What Self-Hosting Socipub Actually Requires

Socipub is a Next.js 16 app (React 19) with a Supabase PostgreSQL backend. Self-hosting means reproducing three connected pieces, and all three are free-tier friendly:

1. A Supabase project. The Supabase free tier fits comfortably: 500 MB database, two active projects. Socipub's schema ships as four migrations in the repo — 001_profiles, 002_social_accounts, 003_posts, 004_ai_credits — which you run against your project. That's the entire database layer; there's no separate DB server to babysit.

2. A Next.js deployment. The frontend is a standard Next.js 16 app. The simplest path is a Vercel project pointed at your repo with the environment variables set. Because the whole app is just frontend + Supabase, any Node host works — the "Docker" part of self-hosting is only about containerizing the Next.js process, not the database. The repo has no drop-in docker-compose.yml, so if you want containers you'd wrap the Next.js build yourself; the database stays managed on Supabase either way.

3. Social OAuth credentials. You need Twitter/X and LinkedIn developer app credentials. Those come from the platform developer portals and go into the environment variables, one pair per network — and there is no way around this, because posting to either platform requires an authorized token. Budget the API review time; platform approvals, not the code, are usually the slow step.

The 26 Environment Variables, Grouped

Sixteen of the twenty-six are straightforward copies from dashboards. The decision points are the five Creem product IDs (matching your own price book) and the two OAuth secret pairs.

The Posting Route Worth Knowing

The scheduled post is delivered by an API route that reads the posts table (migration 003) and calls the network API for each due post with the account's stored token. If a post fails, it stays in the table in a retryable state rather than silently vanishing. When you're debugging a self-hosted setup, start here: check that the service-role key can read posts, confirm the token is fresh, and look at the route's logs for the exact error.

What Changes vs. the Cloud Version

The honest trade-off: self-hosting buys you data locality and zero per-seat pricing, and it costs you setup time and ongoing maintenance. For a solo creator the cloud free tier is usually enough; self-hosting starts to pay when data residency is a requirement or you want unlimited posting under your own infrastructure.

Getting Started

1. Create a Supabase project and run the four migrations in order.
2. Create Twitter and LinkedIn developer apps and note the client IDs/secrets.
3. Deploy the Next.js app to Vercel and set all 26 environment variables.
4. Connect an account in the UI and schedule a test post.

For the privacy and compliance side of running your own instance, see our GDPR guide. And if you'd rather skip the setup entirely, the cloud version reaches the same scheduling features in five minutes.