Solo Laptop or Mac mini

Why pick this shape

• No networking surprises — localhost is your cluster.
• Mix `docker`, `local` (Python via uv), and `native` (launchd / systemd) on the same host.
• The same registry.yml that runs your laptop today scales to 5+ machines later without rewrites.

Registry skeleton

Copy, replace IPs and ssh_user, point CADDY_REGISTRY_PATH at it.

domain: internal
hosts:
  laptop:
    ip: 127.0.0.1
    arch: arm64-apple
    ssh_user: <your-user>
    path: <repo-base-path>
    roles: [everything]
services:
  notes-api:
    hostname: notes.internal
    current_host: laptop
    deployment_type: docker
    docker_compose: /notes-api/docker-compose.yml
    port: 8400
  notes-worker:
    hostname: notes-worker.internal
    current_host: laptop
    deployment_type: local
    service_file: /notes_worker/service.yml
    port: 9001

Bringing it up

docker compose up                        # the demo, on port 8080
./portoser registry validate
./portoser deploy laptop notes-api notes-worker
./portoser health check-all

Common gotchas

• macOS ships Bash 3.2 — install Bash 5 via Homebrew before running the CLI.
• Even on a single host, Portoser uses SSH (to localhost). Make sure passwordless local SSH works.
• A single-host setup has no failover. When the laptop sleeps, the cluster sleeps.