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Introduction
What Ant is, and the three pillars it is built around.
Ant takes the project in your current directory, builds it into a container
image, and runs it on your machine, with Docker and, optionally, a managed
Caddy for local domains. There is no server, agent, or remote database to set
up. The CLI is a single binary, ant.
Everything Ant does falls under three pillars:
| Pillar | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Build | Turn a project into an image, dockerfile, nixpacks, buildpacks, railpack, or a pre-built image |
| Collab | Your portable identity, the users on each machine, and the groups that divide a codebase |
| Deploy | Run it locally, route a local domain, or ship the image to a remote machine |
The metaphor
Ants names its parts after a colony, and the names carry the design:
- A nest is a machine you deploy to. Your laptop is the first nest.
- A colony is the people: your account, the users on a machine, their roles.
- A group is a set of projects that share a network, env, and secrets.
- A trail is a deploy, a marked path from a project up to production.
- The midden is what you clear out:
ant trail prunereclaims disk.
No queen means no central server everyone waits behind. Your project is built and run on your own machine, and remote work is opt-in.
Local first
ant trail deploy local needs only Docker. Caddy and the optional builders are
detected and reported by ant nest tools, never assumed. Identity and remote
machines stay off until you turn them on.