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Fleet

Quick Start

This walkthrough covers the most common first steps: discovering existing apps, checking status, deploying an app, running health checks, and initialising the secrets vault.

1. Auto-discover existing apps

If you already have Docker Compose apps on the server, fleet init scans for them and registers each one:

Terminal window
sudo fleet init

Fleet looks for docker-compose.yml files, generates a systemd service unit for each app, and adds them to the registry at data/registry.json.

2. Check the dashboard

Terminal window
sudo fleet status

Output:

Fleet Dashboard
3 apps | 2 healthy | 1 unhealthy


APP          SYSTEMD   CONTAINERS   HEALTH
myapp        active    2/2          ✓ healthy
api          active    1/1          ✓ healthy
worker       failed    0/1          ✗ down

3. Deploy an app

Point fleet deploy at the directory containing your docker-compose.yml:

Terminal window
sudo fleet deploy /srv/myapp

Fleet will:

  1. Register the app if it is not already in the registry
  2. Run docker compose build
  3. Start (or restart) the systemd service

4. Run health checks

Terminal window
sudo fleet health

Check a single app:

Terminal window
sudo fleet health myapp

Health checks cover systemd unit state, container running status, and an optional HTTP endpoint if healthPath is set in the registry.

5. Initialise the secrets vault

Terminal window
sudo fleet secrets init

This generates an age keypair at /etc/fleet/age.key, writes the public key to the manifest, and installs a fleet-unseal.service systemd unit that decrypts secrets to /run/fleet-secrets/ on boot.

Once the vault is initialised, import an existing .env file:

Terminal window
sudo fleet secrets import myapp /srv/myapp/.env

Check vault status at any time:

Terminal window
sudo fleet secrets status

Next steps