Swarmlet

Website — Documentation — Demo 🧞‍♂

Swarmlet is a self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service that runs on any single server. It's mainly intended for use with multiple servers, a server cluster / swarm. Heavily inspired by Dokku.

NOTE

Work In Progress.
This project is in beta and definitely not production-ready yet.

• Project boards: https://github.com/orgs/swarmlet/projects
• Join us on Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/swarmlet/shared_invite/zt-eki9qa53-9FdvUik604rncp61dbawkQ

TL;DR

Why choose Kubernetes over Docker + Docker Swarm?
Why not automate some deployment things to get a pretty simple, versatile and solid setup?
Bonus, you're familiar with Docker already.

How:
Install swarmlet on a server. Develop projects locally as usual, add a docker-compose.yml file to describe your application stack, add a git remote, e.g. git remote add swarm [email protected]:my-project.
Then simply git push swarm master to deploy the project on your swarm (server cluster). A load balancer, SSL, and metrics/logging (optional) are enabled by default.

What is Swarmlet?

Swarmlet is a thin wrapper around Docker Compose and Docker Swarm mode.
A few core services, Traefik (v2.3), Let's Encrypt, Ansible and GlusterFS are included by default.
These enable automatic SSL, load balancing, swarm state management and distributed file storage.
Let's Encrypt wildcard certificates support - more info.

During the installation you can choose to install Matamo, Portainer, Swarmpit and Swarmprom.
These optional services are included to provide analytics and various metrics dashboards.

This project is aimed at developers that want to experiment with application deployment in a flexible multi-server / high-availability environment. The goal is to be able to set up your own swarm and deploy your app(s) in minutes.

Getting started

1. Install Swarmlet on a new VPS running Ubuntu 18.04 x64 as root.
2. Edit your local SSH config to use ssh swarm instead of ssh [email protected]
3. Use an existing project, or clone one of the examples
4. Add a docker-compose.yml file in the root of your project
5. Add a git remote: git remote add swarm [email protected]:my-project
6. Deploy your application stack to the swarm using git push swarm master

Example application setup and deployment guide

Installation

Make sure you have a (sub) domain available which is pointed to your server, this is necessary to access the Traefik or Portainer/Matomo dashboards located at e.g. portainer.your-domain.com.

To install the latest version of Swarmlet, log in to your server as root and run:

curl -fsSL https://get.swarmlet.dev | bash

The installation should take a few minutes to complete.

Full installation instructions can be found here

Custom installation

# Headless (noninteractive) installation:
curl -fsSL https://get.swarmlet.dev | bash -s \
  INSTALLATION_TYPE=noninteractive \
  INSTALL_ZSH=true \
  INSTALL_MODULES="matomo swarmpit" \
  NEW_HOSTNAME=swarm-manager-1 \
  SWARMLET_USERNAME=admin \
  SWARMLET_PASSWORD=nicepassword \
  ROOT_DOMAIN=dev.mydomain.com

Examples

Swarmlet includes various examples of services that you can deploy to your server cluster with a simple git push.

• swarmlet-website - The swarmlet.dev website
• get-swarmlet - The get.swarmlet.dev install script
• Basic example - Static site
• Basic example - Python web server + Redis
• Moderate example - NGINX + React app + Node.js API
• (FIX) Advanced example - NGINX + React app + Node.js API + CMS + staging/production
• (FIX) GitLab CE (self-hosted)
• (FIX) GitLab Runner (self-hosted)

All these examples and the Swarmlet documentation and website are running on a €5/mo single server 'cluster', using Swarmlet for deployments.