Mooring is a self-hosted PaaS for Docker. You describe your app in one mooring.yaml; it writes the Dockerfile and the Compose, issues and renews the certs, deploys when you git push, and keeps an eye on the whole thing — health, alerts, backups, self-healing. No Kubernetes. No Swarm. No reverse proxy or certbot to babysit.
A self-hosted alternative to Heroku & Railway — and to CapRover, Coolify & Dokploy.
Certs, routing, deploys, monitoring, backups — set up for you, locked down by default, and out of your way.
Give an app a domain; Mooring issues and renews the certificate and routes traffic. No proxy to run, no certbot.
Connect a repo, hit Deploy. Mooring writes and owns the Compose file and the Dockerfile — you never touch either.
Live health for every app and the host, with email, webhook, Slack, Discord or Telegram alerts and quiet hours.
Encrypted snapshots of your whole setup, with a safe restore onto a fresh server.
Opt-in and conservative by default: it keeps stateless services responsive, restarts crashed ones, and pages you when it can't cope on its own.
Mooring reaches Docker through a read-only proxy — never the raw socket. It ships with a written threat model, and checks its own version against security advisories.
Most tools put a UI on top of Docker, or layer a PaaS on Swarm/Kubernetes. Mooring sits in between as a typed control plane.
vs. the tools people usually compare it to.
| Mooring | CapRover | Coolify | Dokploy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No Docker Swarm required | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ |
| No Kubernetes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Generates & owns Compose + Dockerfile | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Single static binary (no extra DB) | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Documented security / threat model | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ~ |
Comparisons are best-effort based on each project's public docs — corrections welcome.
On any Linux server with Docker. Debian / Ubuntu:
curl -fsSL https://daboss2003.github.io/mooring/gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/mooring.gpg echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mooring.gpg] https://daboss2003.github.io/mooring stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mooring.list sudo apt update && sudo apt install mooring
Prefer a one-off? Grab a .deb / .rpm / static binary from the latest release. Then follow the installation guide.
Mooring