Use Cases

Real hardware. Real registries. Real commands.

Pick the shape closest to yours. Each page shows the registry.yml skeleton, the deploy flow, the gotchas specific to that hardware, and links to the deeper docs walkthrough.

Solo Laptop or Mac mini

1 machine · macOS or Linux · 8–32 GB RAM

One machine. All three deployment types. The shape that grows.

First deploy: ~5 minutes

See setup

Raspberry Pi Home Lab

3–6 Pis · arm64-linux · plus one buildx host

The shape Portoser was built for. Cheap 24/7 compute, role-based.

First deploy: ~30–45 minutes

See setup

Mixed Studio Cluster

2× Mac mini + 2× Pi + 1× x86 box · cross-arch + cross-OS

Mac minis + Pis + maybe one x86 box. One registry, every architecture.

First deploy: ~1 hour from cold start

See setup

Home + VPS Hybrid

Local cluster + VPS · WireGuard or Tailscale mesh · mTLS over the link

Private dev cluster at home. Public face on a VPS. One registry drives both.

First deploy: ~2–3 hours including mesh VPN

See setup

What's the same across every shape

  • One registry.yml is the source of truth.
  • SSH key auth, no agents installed on workers.
  • Self-healing loop runs on every deploy.
  • Web UI, CLI, and (preview) MCP server work identically.
  • mTLS between services if you opt in.
Hardware setups in the docs