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Mangrove turns one Linux box into a small platform for running your apps. Point it at a Git repository, a Dockerfile, a compose file or a pre-built image, and Mangrove builds it, runs it, checks it’s healthy, and puts it behind a reverse proxy. Push to GitHub and it redeploys itself. It is in the same family as Coolify and Dokploy: something you run yourself, on your own hardware, that makes deploying feel like a hosted platform. It is built to be small. The reference box throughout development has been 2 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of disk, with Mangrove and the apps it runs sharing that box.

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What you get

  • Deploys that can’t take a working app down. A new version starts next to the old one and only takes traffic once it passes its health check. If it never does, the old version keeps running.
  • GitHub auto-deploy, staging environments that promote the exact commit they tested, and a preview deployment for every pull request.
  • Custom domains with automatic HTTPS, including from a home server behind a router with no static IP.
  • One-click templates for common self-hosted apps: Ghost, WordPress, Gitea, Supabase, PocketBase, NocoDB, Vaultwarden, Uptime Kuma, n8n, Umami, and standalone Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB and Redis.
  • A dashboard with two faces: a technical view, and a Simple mode for people who just want “a blog” running.
  • More ways in: a CLI, a full-screen terminal UI, and an MCP server for AI agents, all talking to the same API.
  • Optional extras for a home server: turn a plugged-in drive into a NAS, and let idle apps sleep until someone visits.

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What it is not

Not a hosted service. You run it, on a box you control. Not a cluster scheduler. Mangrove runs everything on one machine, using Docker directly. There is no Kubernetes underneath and no multi-machine scheduling. Not a sandbox for untrusted code. Apps run as ordinary Docker containers, and Mangrove itself needs Docker access, which is equivalent to root on the box. Run code you trust, on a box that does nothing else. See Security and isolation. Not a replacement for app-level backups. Mangrove can back up its own state (projects, settings, secrets), but the data inside your apps’ volumes needs its own backup plan. See Backups and restore.

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How it fits together

Mangrove is one binary with the dashboard embedded in it. Its state lives in a single SQLite file. It shells out to Docker to build and run containers, and drives Caddy through Caddy’s admin API, so there is no Caddyfile to maintain. More in Architecture.