Hostlet Core

Hostlet Core is for developers comfortable operating a Linux server who want to turn supported GitHub repositories into live apps without assembling build, container, routing, health-check, and rollback tooling themselves. The control plane and deployment worker run on infrastructure you control.

Hostlet Cloud is the managed portfolio service; Hostlet Core is the open-source engine you can run yourself. Billing, tenant management, and hosted-service infrastructure are intentionally not part of Core.

Hostlet Core is pre-1.0 beta software. It currently runs one control plane and one local deployment agent on a single Linux host. Remote-host registration, multi-host scheduling, high availability, and an SLA are not included.

Run repositories you trust, keep backups, and review the security guide before exposing Hostlet or its apps publicly. Core is not a hardened isolation boundary for mutually untrusted tenants.

• GitHub-backed app deployment on your own Docker host.
• Dockerfile and Railpack-generated app support.
• Deployment logs, runtime health, restart, rollback, and delete flows.
• Encrypted app environment variables.
• App screenshot capture for exposed app URLs.
• Optional Cloudflare Tunnel support for public URLs.
• Digest-pinned release images from GHCR.

Prerequisites:

• Linux x86_64 with glibc 2.39 or newer, such as Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or newer. Alpine/musl and older glibc distributions are not supported by the current CLI binary.
• Docker Engine with a reachable daemon and Docker Compose v2.
• Git and curl.
• GitHub OAuth App with Device Flow enabled.

Install the self-hosted CLI:

git clone https://github.com/KanterLabs/hostlet-core.git
cd hostlet-core
[ "$(uname -m)" = "x86_64" ] || { echo "Stable releases currently support Linux x86_64 only" >&2; exit 1; }
glibc_output="$(getconf GNU_LIBC_VERSION 2>/dev/null || true)"
if [[ "$glibc_output" =~ ^glibc[[:space:]]+([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+)(\.[0-9]+)?$ ]]; then
  glibc_major="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
  glibc_minor="${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"
else
  echo "Stable releases require glibc 2.39 or newer" >&2
  exit 1
fi
(( glibc_major > 2 || (glibc_major == 2 && glibc_minor >= 39) )) || {
  echo "Stable releases require glibc 2.39 or newer (found $glibc_major.$glibc_minor)" >&2
  exit 1
}
curl -fLO https://github.com/KanterLabs/hostlet-core/releases/latest/download/hostlet-linux-x64
curl -fLO https://github.com/KanterLabs/hostlet-core/releases/latest/download/hostlet-linux-x64.sha256
sha256sum --check hostlet-linux-x64.sha256
sudo install -m 0755 hostlet-linux-x64 /usr/local/bin/hostlet

Initialize and start:

hostlet preflight
hostlet init
hostlet up

For self-hosted Cloudflare Tunnel mode:

hostlet up --tunnel

Open the URL printed by the CLI, complete first-run setup, connect GitHub, and deploy an app.

• Documentation index
• Self-hosting guide
• Deploying apps
• Operations
• Architecture
• Security

Core support is best effort. For reproducible bugs and setup problems, read the support guide and open a GitHub issue. Do not put credentials, environment files, private repository details, or suspected vulnerabilities in an issue. Report security concerns through the security policy.

cargo run -p hostlet -- --help
docker compose -f infra/docker-compose.yml up -d

See CONTRIBUTING.md for validation commands and release expectations.