Documentation

Shipwick runs Docker applications on a single server: health checks, zero-downtime deployments, rollbacks, resource limits and HTTPS, from one small deploy.yaml. This page says what it is, what it is not, and where to find things.

Start here

New to Shipwick? Three pages take you from an empty server to a running application: Install on a server, Install the CLI, Your first deployment. Everything else on this site is for when you want to know more.

What Shipwick is

Shipwick is a single agent that runs on your server and turns a deploy.yaml into running, supervised containers.

yaml

# deploy.yaml
name: my-api
image: ghcr.io/company/my-api:1.4.2
port: 8080
domain: api.example.com
replicas: 2

bash

shipwick deploy

It is for developers and small teams running 1–20 applications on a VPS — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH, EC2 or similar — who want Docker in production without writing their own deploy scripts, restart logic, health checks, rollbacks and reverse-proxy configuration.

One binary, one SQLite file. No cluster, no control plane, no external database.
Docker is the runtime. Anything that runs with docker run runs on Shipwick.
A failed deployment never takes down the version that works.

The parts:

Part	Role
Agent	Runs on the server. Owns the deployment lifecycle, supervises containers, configures Caddy. Keeps its state in SQLite.
`shipwick`	The command-line client, for your laptop and for CI.
Dashboard	The same information and everyday actions in a browser.
Caddy	Serves application domains over HTTPS. The agent tells it what to route where.

What Shipwick is not

Shipwick is for one server, by design. It schedules nothing across machines, runs no service mesh and has no extension model. It does not build images, and it needs no external database or queue.

When one server is no longer enough, you have outgrown Shipwick. Until then, it is the whole platform.

Status: 0.x

The current version is 0.3.0. Before 1.0, a minor version may change the API, deploy.yaml or the on-disk format. The changelog says so when it happens, and how to upgrade.

How the documentation is organized

Getting started

Install the server and the CLI, then deploy an application.

Concepts

How Shipwick works and why it behaves the way it does.

Tasks

How to do one specific thing.

Reference

Every field, command, variable and endpoint.

Security

An admin token is equivalent to root SSH access to the server. Read Security before you put Shipwick on a machine that matters.

Source and license

Shipwick is open source under the Apache License 2.0. The source, the issue tracker and the releases are at github.com/shipwick/shipwick.

Documentation ​

What Shipwick is ​

What Shipwick is not ​

How the documentation is organized ​

Getting started ​

Concepts ​

Tasks ​

Reference ​

Security ​

Source and license ​