What is Mushak?
Mushak (Persian for "Rocket" 🚀) is a CLI tool designed to bring a PaaS-like deployment experience to your own Linux VPS or Home lab. It allows you to deploy Docker-based applications with a simple git push, handling build triggers, health checks, and zero-downtime traffic switching automatically.
Why Mushak?
In the modern devops landscape, developers often face a binary choice:
- Expensive PaaS: Heroku, Vercel, Railway. Easy to use, but costs scale rapidly and you don't own the infrastructure.
- Complex DIY: Kubernetes, manual Docker management, Nginx config hacking. Cheap infrastructure, but high maintenance and complexity.
Mushak sits in the middle. It gives you the "Heroku experience" (git push to deploy) on your own $5 DigitalOcean/Hetzner droplet.
Targeted Audience
Mushak is not for everyone.
- It is not for large enterprises needing complex orchestration (use K8s).
- It is not for serverless functions (use Vercel/Lambda).
It is for:
- Solo Developers shipping side projects.
- Small Teams who want to iterate fast without a dedicated DevOps engineer.
- Agencies managing multiple client projects on a few efficient servers.
Core Philosophy
1. Zero Configuration
If your project has a Dockerfile or docker-compose.yml, it should just work. Mushak infers how to build and run your app. You shouldn't need to write a complex CI/CD pipeline just to get a container running.
2. Zero Downtime
Deployments should never break the site. Mushak spins up the new version alongside the old one, waits for it to be healthy, and only then switches the traffic. If the new version fails, the old one stays active.
3. Simplicity > Flexibility
Mushak makes opinionated choices (Linux, Caddy, Docker) to keep the tool simple and reliable. We prioritize "just working" over infinite configurability.