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InstaCloud’s runtime is open source. InstaCloud OSS is one daemon that drives your Docker and answers the same API the hosted platform answers, so the same insta CLI, the same MCP server and the same agent skills work against it.

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What you get

  • One daemon (instad) over Docker: a Postgres container per branch, an S3-compatible bucket per storage service, your app containers, managed Redis, MySQL and MongoDB.
  • The cloud’s API surface: insta status, project, services, deploy, branch, secrets, db, template, compute, metrics, logs, events, approvals, plus the governance policy routes the dashboard drives (the CLI has no policy command, here or on the cloud).
  • The cloud’s URL shape: https://<group>-<project>-<branch>.<your-domain> for apps and pg-<name>-<project>-<branch>.<your-domain>:5432 for databases.
  • Serverless behaviour on one box: idle services sleep, traffic wakes them. See sleep and wake.
  • Branches that fork the disk: insta branch create reflink-copies a sleeping database in about a second at any size, and streams an awake one (or any, without reflinks) in time proportional to its size. See branching.
  • The bundled template catalog served through the cloud’s /templates routes, so insta template list works with no internet access. Each template declares the CPU architectures its image is published for, and a deploy this box cannot run is refused up front.
  • The dashboard, served by the daemon itself and laid out like the hosted console: a Service canvas, Quick Start, Observability, Secrets, Branches and Settings, and each service’s own detail with Metrics, Variables, Runtime Logs and Settings, plus a Database tab for Postgres, a Volume tab for apps, and Connect on every database.
Not there yet: billing and usage metering, organizations and members, multi-node scheduling, and the backups API (pg_dump plus a tar of the data directory is the documented path until it ships). Those routes answer 501 with guidance that names the alternative rather than pretending to work. COMPATIBILITY.md is the command-by-command list.

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Two ways to run it

Server mode is the one-liner on the install page. Local mode is the clone and npm run dev on the same page.

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The pages

Install

The one-liner, what it writes, the firewall and Docker settings it changes, and local mode.

Set up access

The admin account, API tokens, insta login --api-key, MCP, and a lost password.

Domains and TLS

Every hostname the daemon mints, your own domain, certificates, and public database ports.

Sleep and wake

What counts as activity, when a service sleeps, how it wakes, always-on, and the knobs.

Branching

How a branch forks the database files and volumes, and where the data lives.

Upgrade and backups

Re-run the installer, pin a version, roll back, and back up until the API ships.