A Linux box
A $6 droplet is enough to start. Docker and a couple of gigabytes of RAM — the stack is five containers, not fifty.
Self-hosting
One machine.
Everything on it.
Astrodock is a single stack you run yourself. Not a control plane that phones home, not an agent that manages your servers from somewhere else — the whole platform, on your box, with nothing it needs from the outside world to keep working.
What you need
A machine and a domain.
A domain you control
One wildcard DNS record pointed at the machine. Every app then gets its own subdomain automatically.
Ten minutes
One command to install, a browser to finish setup, and you're deploying.
What's in the box
Five parts, already
talking to each other.
The pieces you'd otherwise assemble from four vendors and a weekend of YAML. They ship together, configured, with the wiring between them already done.
Nothing here is a hosted service in disguise. There's no account to create, no API key to paste, and no free tier that quietly ends. If your machine has power and a network, the platform works.
Routing & TLS
Caddy — certificates issued and renewed on their own
Database
Postgres — one per app, created on request
Object storage
S3-compatible, scoped per app
Control plane
The dashboard, the API, sign-in
Runner
Builds, runs and watches your apps
Getting it running
Three ways to start.
1
On a server
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/astrodock/astrodock/main/scripts/install.sh | sh
Fetches the stack, generates every secret, pulls the images and starts everything. You finish in the browser.
2
On your laptop
The same stack runs locally for trying it out or building against it, without a domain and without certificates.
3
On DigitalOcean, step by step
A walkthrough from an empty account to a working platform, including the DNS record and what to click.
Keeping it running
The boring parts, handled.
Upgrades
One command pulls the new release and restarts the stack. Your apps keep running across it — they're separate processes, not part of the platform.
Backups
Scheduled dumps of every app database and the platform's own state, on a retention you choose, written to your disk.
Alerts
Health checks on every app, with an email when one stops answering and another when it comes back.
The point of all this
You own the whole thing.
The apps are yours, the data is in a Postgres database you can dump, the files are in a bucket you can read, and the platform is MIT-licensed source you can fork. There is no export feature because there is nothing to export from.
It also means you can move. Take the machine to a different provider, or point an app at a managed database instead of the internal one — same app, same code, different connection string.
Being straight with you
What it isn't.
It isn't Kubernetes. One machine, one stack, no cluster and no failover. If you need to survive a region going dark, this is the wrong tool and you should use a different one.
It isn't built for scale. It's built for the dozens of small things a person or a team actually runs — internal tools, side projects, client work, the thing your agent wrote on Tuesday. Not your product's primary traffic.
It isn't zero-maintenance. You still own the machine, the operating system and the backups. Astrodock makes each of those one command, not zero.
It isn't finished. It's young software, developed in the open. The source is there, the issues are public, and the limitations are written down rather than discovered.
Give it a machine
and ten minutes.
Hosted Astrodock is coming — the same platform and the same apps, without the machine.