Introduction

Do you have apps you want to deploy to a server, but Kubernetes is way too heavy? Harbormaster is for you.

Harbormaster is a small and simple container orchestrator that lets you easily deploy multiple Docker-Compose applications on a single host.

How does it work?

Let’s say you have a bog-standard Compose-packaged app in a git repository:

services:
  main:
    build: .
    volumes:
      - ./data:/app_data
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    restart: unless-stopped

You want this deployed onto some server, but you want something that can check your repo every so often, see if there are any changes, and deploy/restart your app if so.

That’s what Harbormaster does. You run its Docker container on the server, and give it a config file:

apps:
  myapp:
    url: github.com/yourusername/myapp.git

Harbormaster will look at its config file, clone the myapp repo, and run docker compose up on it. Harbormaster will run periodically, pull the repo, and restart your Docker containers if there’s a change.

NOTE: Harbormaster does not provide ingress, you’ll need to bring your own. It just runs your apps.

What about my data, though?

Excellent question, your application has data you want to persist. For tidiness, Harbormaster provides its own mountpoint where you should persist the data (for more information on this, see the handling data directories section).

All you need to do, is change your app’s Compose file to mount the app_data directory into the Harbormaster-provided directory instead:

services:
  main:
    build: .
    volumes:
      - ${HM_DATA_DIR}:/app_data
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    restart: unless-stopped

Now all your apps’ data will be stored neatly under harbormaster-main/data/myapp/.

That’s it!

Now you can read on about how to install Harbormaster.