Introduction

LightShuttle is a developer-time orchestrator written in Rust. You declare your service stack once in lightshuttle.yml (databases, queues, containers, Dockerfiles), and lightshuttle up boots the whole thing on your laptop with automatic service discovery, an integrated web dashboard, OpenTelemetry traces and logs, and a one-command export to docker-compose.yml, Kubernetes manifests or a Helm chart for production.

LightShuttle is sponsored by Nubster and dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0.

Install

LightShuttle needs a running Docker daemon and a Rust toolchain (rustup is the recommended installer). Install the CLI from crates.io:

cargo install lightshuttle

Confirm the install:

$ lightshuttle --version
lightshuttle 0.4.0

Quickstart

Create a lightshuttle.yml at the root of your project:

project:
  name: hello
resources:
  db:
    postgres:
      version: "16"

Boot the stack:

lightshuttle up

LightShuttle validates the manifest, pulls the image, starts Postgres, waits for the healthcheck to pass and supervises the container until you press Ctrl+C. Shutdown is coordinated and idempotent.

How this documentation is organised

This site follows the Diátaxis framework: four kinds of documentation, each serving a different need.

• Tutorials are lessons that take you by the hand through a series of steps. Start here if you are new.
• How-to guides are recipes for solving a specific task once you know the basics.
• Reference is the exhaustive, normative description of the manifest, the CLI and the public APIs.
• Explanation discusses the design and the reasoning behind it.

Status

LightShuttle is published on crates.io and under active development. The public API is pre-1.0 and may change between minor versions; see the SemVer policy and the roadmap.