hoster

hoster 0.2.0

LHelge — Mon, 9 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

0.2.0 redesigns the admin UI from the ground up. Every page from 0.1 is still there, but each one was rebuilt against one design system. This site now uses it as well.

One design system

Catppuccin, light and dark. Latte in light mode and Mocha in dark mode, following your system setting. In Latte, the accent and status colours are darkened until all text reaches 4.5:1 contrast.
JetBrains Mono for everything machine-derived (names, digests, paths, numbers, labels) and the system font for prose. The font ships with the binary, so nothing loads from a CDN.
Lucide icons, served as one cached SVG sprite.
Every page was checked at 1440 px and 375 px in both themes. Primary and destructive actions are at least 44 px tall on narrow screens.

Page by page

Shell. A sidebar with navigation, counts and warning badges. It moves above the page on narrow screens.
Dashboard. KPI tiles for traffic and latency, a stacks table and a certificates card.
Stacks. Stacks are shown as cards with a status filter. Each stack has tabs:
- Overview: KPI tiles, slowest routes, routes and volumes.
- Services: uptime and ports. This replaces the old Containers page.
- Logs: per-service chips, since presets and a follow switch.
- Environment: env vars and write-only secrets.
- Deployments: history, with a detail page for each deployment.
New stack. The apply page is now an editor. Beside it, the plan and pre-flight checks are shown before you confirm.
Certificates. Summary tiles, an alert for failing certificates, a table and bulk actions.
Settings. A section sub-nav, registry credentials as field rows, and read-only views of the effective configuration.
System. Version cards, the update flow and facts about the host.

How hoster works describes each page.

Updating

hoster update

Or use Update on the System page. Nothing changed in hoster.toml or in the stack file format.

hoster 0.2.1

LHelge — Mon, 9 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

0.2.1 makes no change to the binary. It is the release that publishes this version of the docs site, which only deploys when a release is tagged.

The docs look like the admin UI

The site now uses the admin UI’s design system from 0.2.0: Catppuccin Latte or Mocha, following your system setting, JetBrains Mono for code and paths, and the same sidebar, cards and tables. Each docs page lists the other guides by category in the sidebar, and on wide screens an “On this page” list sits beside the text.

A post for every release

The Releases page has a post for every release since 0.1.0, written for the people running hoster: what changed, and what to know before updating. The GitHub release keeps the full list of commits. The Atom feed lets you follow new releases.

Updating

Not needed; nothing changed in the binary. hoster update brings you to 0.2.1 as usual if you want the version number to match.

hoster 0.1.0

LHelge — Sun, 8 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

hoster 0.1.0 is the first release. It covers everything the design calls for in v1: a GitHub Actions release workflow pushes an image, and a minute later the new version serves traffic on its hostname with a valid certificate, without dropping a request.

curl -fsSL https://github.com/LHelge/hoster/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sudo bash

Installing hoster walks through the rest of the setup: the GitHub OAuth App, hoster.toml and hoster doctor.

What’s in it

One binary under systemd. A statically linked Rust binary, for x86_64 and aarch64, runs as a systemd user service of a dedicated hoster user. The reverse proxy, ACME client, deploy engine, webhook receiver, registry poller and admin UI are all part of it.
An embedded proxy. Pingora terminates TLS on :443 and routes by host and path prefix. Routes can strip prefixes and set their own timeouts, and responses stream through.
Certificates. HTTP-01 issuance and renewal through Let’s Encrypt, with persisted backoff so failures never use up the rate limit, and a DNS check before each attempt.
Deploys by digest, without downtime. A new container starts next to the old one and must pass its health probes. The route then swaps atomically and the old container drains. A deploy that crashes halfway is recovered on restart.
Deploys from CI without a secret. The deploy webhook accepts the job’s GitHub OIDC token and checks it against each stack’s [deploy] rule. A registry poller is the fallback for images that track a tag.
Stacks. A TOML stack file declares services, routes, env vars, encrypted secrets and named volumes. Each stack runs on its own podman network.
An admin UI with GitHub login. Apply and diff stack files, deploy, roll back, cancel, follow container logs live, manage secrets and registry credentials, and watch certificate status and live traffic statistics.
Housekeeping. Reconciliation at startup and on a timer, image garbage collection that keeps a rollback image per service, and hoster backup for a consistent database snapshot (see Backing up and restoring).
Self-update. hoster update and hoster rollback, or the System page, fetch a release, verify its checksum, switch to it and roll back automatically if it fails to start.

hoster 0.1.1

LHelge — Sun, 8 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first install of 0.1.0 on a real host, Ubuntu 26.04, failed before hoster ever ran. This release fixes that.

The unit starts on Ubuntu

Ubuntu 23.10 and later restrict unprivileged user namespaces (kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns=1), which leaves the systemd user manager with no capabilities. Every unit directive that drops capabilities then fails, and the unit stopped with 218/CAPABILITIES.

hoster.service no longer sets CapabilityBoundingSet=, PrivateDevices=, ProtectKernelModules=, ProtectKernelLogs= or ProtectClock=. hoster runs with no capabilities anyway, and NoNewPrivileges= and the @privileged system call filter still cover what those directives added. A new advisory hoster doctor check, unit_sandbox, says when such a host skips the file-system sandbox. Hardening lists which protections apply where.

CI now starts the unit for real with a stub binary, so a directive that fails to start is caught before release.

Updating

If 0.1.0 failed to start on your host, run the install command again; it installs the new unit too:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/LHelge/hoster/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sudo bash

hoster 0.1.2

LHelge — Sun, 8 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Admin UI actions are no longer refused

hoster 0.1.0 and 0.1.1 sent Referrer-Policy: no-referrer. Under that policy, browsers send Origin: null on a same-origin POST, so the admin UI’s CSRF check refused every action button (for example Check for updates) with “cross-origin request refused”. hoster now sends Referrer-Policy: same-origin. Other sites still get no referrer, and the admin UI’s own requests keep their origin.

Hosting a static site

Hosting a static site is a new guide for deploying a site built by a static site generator. CI packs it into a small nginx image, and hoster deploys it like any other service, with deploys by digest, certificates and zero downtime. A complete example lives in examples/static-site/.

Updating

hoster update

Updates and rollback has the details. Because of the bug above, the Update button on the System page only works from 0.1.2 on.

hoster 0.1.3

LHelge — Sun, 8 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This release changes nothing about how hoster runs. The release is the first one to ship this site.

The docs have a home

The user guides used to be Markdown files in the repository. They now make up this site, built with aphid, with a new How hoster works page as the entry point. A broken cross-reference now fails the build, so links between guides stay correct.

The site is deployed by hoster itself. Each release tag packs it into an nginx image and deploys it through the same OIDC webhook described in Deploying from CI, following the static site guide step by step. Messages from the binary, install.sh, the systemd unit and the System page now link here.

Under the hood

The release workflow’s docs settings no longer leak into the build job’s environment, where the tests read them as hoster config overrides. That bug stopped the first attempt at this release.
The GitHub Actions now run on their Node 24 versions, and the release build reuses CI’s cache.

Updating

Optional; nothing changed in the binary’s behaviour. hoster update brings you up to date as usual.