GitHub - Levelrail: Self-hosted deployment platform: push to git, get a running app with TLS, logs, metrics, and rollback.

I run Coolify for other apps and I'm moving my own apps over to Levelrail as I test it toward a stable release, so this is a "why I built it" answer, not a pitch.

The main reason I built it: I wanted to drive everything from the CLI and from an AI assistant, and I wanted it to stay light.

CLI and MCP are first class

• levelrail-cli covers the whole API: deploy, logs, metrics, rollback, exec, domains, DNS, backups, import. Everything in the dashboard is a command too.
• There is an MCP server on top of the same API (about 170 tools). Point Claude Code or any MCP client at it and you can ask "why was this app slow at 3am" or "diagnose this crashloop" and it reads real metrics, logs and deploy history. There is a read-only mode, and tool output is marked as untrusted so a log line cannot steer the assistant.

Light because it's one Go binary

• Control plane is a single static binary with Caddy and SQLite embedded. No PHP app, no separate Postgres/Redis/realtime containers for the platform itself.
• The control plane on my server is sitting around 130 to 170 MB RAM and about 1% of one core while managing 7 apps and 6 databases.
• Servers are driven by an agent over the Docker Engine API with event streams, not SSH plus parsing docker output, so there is no polling loop burning CPU.

Built in, not bolted on

• Load balancing across replicas and nodes (still behind an experimental flag).
• DNS: manage zones and records at Cloudflare or Route 53 from the dashboard or the CLI, check nameserver delegation and propagation, wildcard subdomains. Add a domain to an app and it can create the A/CNAME for you and walk it to "live".
• SSL: automatic certificates with HTTP-01 or DNS-01 (so wildcards work), bring your own cert, or let an existing Traefik/nginx terminate TLS. It can run behind the proxy you already have, so you do not have to give up ports 80/443 to try it.
• Observability: metrics and logs per app with deploy markers on the charts, and a "what changed" view when something spikes.
• Canary deploys with weighted traffic, apps that sleep when idle and wake on the next request, per-PR preview environments, scheduled backups with restore drills.
• Importer for Coolify, Dokploy and CapRover: stages apps stopped, copies databases with row count checks, and gives a cutover with a rollback. It never writes to the old server, which is how I am moving mine.