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Jump to heading A guide to Scotty

Jump to heading What is Scotty?

Scotty is a so-called Micro-Platform-as-a-Service. It allows you to manage all your docker-compose-based apps with a simple UI and CLI. Scotty provides a simple REST API so you can interact with your apps. It takes care of the lifetime of your apps and includes scope-based authorization to control access to applications and operations. It adds basic auth to prevent unauthorized access if needed and instructs robots to not index your apps.

The primary use-case is to host ephemeral review apps for your projects. It should be relatively easy to integrate Scotty into existing workflows, e.g. with CI/CD pipelines or run it on a case-by-case basis from your local.

Scotty is a very simple orchestrator for your docker-compose-based apps. The UI is designed to be simple and easy to use, so people other than devs can restart a stopped app or check the status of an app.

If you can write a docker-compose-based app which runs on your local, then Scotty should be able to "beam" that app to a server and run it there, with a nice domain name, so you can reach it from the internet.

Jump to heading What is Scotty not?

It's not a solution for production-grade deployments. It's not a replacement for tools like Nomad, Kubernetes or OpenShift. If you need fine-grained control on how your apps are executed, Scotty might not be the right tool for you. It does not orchestrate your apps on a cluster of machines. It's a single-node solution with optional scope-based access control and no support for scaling your apps.

It is also not a replacement for tools like Dockyard or Portainer. However, Scotty does provide basic debugging capabilities including real-time log viewing (via CLI and web UI) and interactive shell access to containers via the CLI.

Scotty wants to be a simple solution for a simple use-case.

Jump to heading Want to start?

Check out the following sections: