Introduction

What is Voodu?

Voodu is a Heroku-shaped, Kubernetes-honest deploy tool you run on your own boxes.

One HCL file describes the running system. voodu apply reconciles it: builds, ships, routes, swaps. No bare repo, no git push, no plugin sprawl — apps, ingress with TLS, and stateful services that actually back themselves up.

app "myapp" "web" {
  image    = "ghcr.io/myorg/myapp:latest"
  replicas = 3

  env = {
    PORT     = "8080"
    NODE_ENV = "production"
  }

  health_check = "/healthz"
  host         = "myapp.example.com"

  tls {
    email = "ops@example.com"
  }
}

voodu apply -f voodu.hcl -r prod-1
# ✓ apply complete in 11.8s
# ✓ https://myapp.example.com  ·  3/3 healthy

Why Voodu?

• One file, one command. No git push, no bare repo, no commit ceremony. Edit, save, voodu apply.
• Declarative apply, not git-push. Diff shows the plan. Apply reconciles. Upsert-only by default — --prune is the explicit opt-in (scoped per (scope, kind)).
• Stateful services are first-class. Postgres, Mongo, Redis (+ sentinel) declared like apps. Plugins ship backup, replicas, and test-restore.
• TLS out of the box. Add tls {} and Voodu cuts a Let's Encrypt cert via Caddy. On-demand wildcards.
• k8s shape, not k8s ops. Same reconciliation loop, none of the CNI/Helm/operator bill.
• 100% self-hosted, MIT. Single Go binary, embedded etcd, no cloud tier, no telemetry.

Quickstart

1. Install Voodu on your laptop
2. Bootstrap a remote
3. Ship your first app

Manifest reference

The full HCL surface, kind by kind:

• Overview — (scope, name), blocks, references
• app — web services, workers, replicas
• ingress + tls — Caddy routes + ACME
• postgres, redis — stateful with backup
• job / cronjob — one-shots and schedules
• config & secrets — out-of-band env

CLI

Six verbs cover ~95% of day-to-day: