FAQ

Why HCL and not YAML?

HCL is built for humans declaring infrastructure. Blocks, labels, and typed values map cleanly to kind/scope/name. You can use .yml if you must — same schema, different syntax.

How is this different from Dokku, Coolify, CapRover?

Those are excellent — and mostly git-push or click-driven. Voodu is declarative at the layer above:

• one file describes the system,
• diff shows the plan,
• apply reconciles.

Stateful services (Postgres, Mongo, Redis HA) are first-class — not bolted on as plugins-of-plugins.

Is it really commitless?

Yes. voodu apply tars whatever directory you're in and streams it over SSH. No bare repo, no git push, no commit required. Edit, save, apply.

What about Kubernetes?

Voodu borrows the shape (declarative, reconciler, source-of-truth) and skips the operations bill (no CNI, no Helm chart, no kube-state-metrics dashboard). One controller per host, embedded etcd, done.

Does it scale beyond one host?

Yes — by design, not by clustering. Three prod boxes behind an ALB? Add three remotes and loop voodu apply -f voodu.hcl -r $r. Same manifest, different SSH targets. The controller is per-host and stateless about its peers — keep it boring.

How do secrets work?

voodu config set stores env vars per-app, out-of-band from the manifest. config:set always wins over env blocks, so a runaway apply can't reset a production secret. See config & secrets.

Does Voodu phone home?

No. Zero telemetry, zero analytics. There is no cloud control plane.

What's the license?

MIT. Self-hosted. No cloud tier, no usage telemetry, no rug pulls planned.

How big can a deployment get?

Voodu has been run successfully on:

• A single $5 VPS for a tiny side project.
• Three c5.large boxes behind an ALB for a small SaaS (~200k req/day).
• A 12-host fleet across two regions (manual remote loop, no internal mesh).

Past a dozen hosts, you might want a real orchestrator. Voodu won't lie to you about that.

Can I run Voodu inside Kubernetes?

You can, but you probably shouldn't. The point of Voodu is to not run a Kubernetes. If you're already on K8s, use what you've got.