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Let a deployment stop itself when nobody’s using it, and start again when someone visits. Useful for side projects and demos on a small box.

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Turn it on

On the deployment’s Overview tab, turn on Idle sleep and choose how many minutes without traffic before it sleeps (30 by default).
  • After that long with no requests, Mangrove stops the container. Its status becomes sleeping.
  • The next visitor sees a short “waking up” page that refreshes itself every 3 seconds. Mangrove starts the container in the background, and the next refresh goes straight through to the app.
  • Wake up on the deployment’s page starts it ahead of time.
A fresh deploy, or turning sleep on, counts as activity, so a deployment never falls asleep the moment you enable it.

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With password protection

A protected deployment checks the password first. Visitors who aren’t signed in see the gate, not the waking page, so strangers can’t keep waking your app.

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Limits

  • Single-service deployments only. Compose stacks can’t sleep, and sleep does nothing useful for a static site, which has no container.
  • Wakes take a few seconds (a container start, not a rebuild). Don’t use sleep for anything that must answer instantly, like a webhook receiver with a short timeout.
  • A sleeping deployment still counts toward the memory budget, because it can wake at any time. Stop it instead to free budget.
  • Only available in technical mode. Not exposed in the CLI, TUI or MCP.
How it works: idle-sleep.md.