Jump to content
Jump to navigation
GitHub

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 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 GitLab CI 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 limited access control and no support for scaling your apps.

It is also not a replacement for tools like Dockyard or Portainer. You will still need to log into the server and use the CLI to debug malfunctioning applications or inspect the logs.

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

Jump to heading Want to start?

Check out the following sections: