bex

The open-source, AI-native alternative to Render.

Deploy from Git to HTTPS on infrastructure you own—and give developers and coding agents the same first-class control plane.

Quickstart · Features · Screenshots · Architecture · Render parity · Contributing

[!WARNING]

bex is in active development and is not ready for production workloads. APIs and configuration can change. The core platform works and is continuously tested; use it today to explore, contribute, and help shape the project.

Why bex

Render, Heroku, and Railway proved the experience developers want: connect a repo, get a URL, and avoid operating Kubernetes by hand. bex makes that experience open source, self-hostable, and programmable by agents.

• A familiar PaaS workflow. Deploy Dockerfiles or native Go, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Elixir projects from Git. Use Render-style render.yaml Blueprints and a Render-compatible CLI and API.
• One control plane for humans and agents. The dashboard, REST, GraphQL, MCP, CLI, and Kubernetes resources operate the same core. There are no dashboard-only deployment actions.
• More than a container launcher. Web services, private services, workers, cron jobs, static sites, managed Postgres, managed Key Value, logs, metrics, deploy history, rollbacks, domains, TLS, and SSH are already represented.
• Your infrastructure and your data. Run the same Go operator against Docker-container machines locally or Hetzner machines in production-shaped clusters. The provider overlay changes; the product does not.
• Inspectable by design. The platform is Apache-2.0, its intent is declarative, and its compatibility claims are tracked in an evidence-backed Render parity ledger.

From repo to URL

Declare a service with the same render.yaml shape many developers and tools already understand:

services:
  - name: api
    type: web
    runtime: docker
    repo: https://github.com/your-org/your-app
    branch: main
    plan: free
    healthCheckPath: /health

databases:
  - name: app-db
    plan: free

The Blueprint API compiles that intent into App and Database resources. The operator builds the source, rolls out the workloads, configures routing and TLS, and reports structured status back through every interface. An agent can perform the same deployment with the MCP deploy tool—repo plus manifest in one call.

See the hello-world examples or the full deployment contract.

What ships today

Some capabilities require optional backing services or explicit configuration and fail closed when unavailable. For the exact REST · GraphQL · MCP · UI status of every capability, use the parity ledger—not this summary—as the source of truth.

See bex in action

Deploy from Git or an image	Follow every deploy
Tail and filter live logs	Correlate metrics with deploys
Manage environment and secrets	Bring a domain; get TLS

Quickstart

This boots the production-shaped local substrate: a kind management cluster, Cluster API, and an app cluster whose machines are Docker containers.

Prerequisites: Docker or OrbStack, Go 1.25+, kubectl, kind, and clusterctl.

In terminal 1:

git clone https://github.com/bex-co/bex.git
cd bex

# Provision the local Cluster API substrate.
bash scripts/mock-cluster.sh
export KUBECONFIG="$PWD/infra/local/bex.kubeconfig"

# Install the CRDs and run the operator from source.
cd lego/operator
make install
BEX_RUNTIME=kubernetes make run

In terminal 2:

cd bex
export KUBECONFIG="$PWD/infra/local/bex.kubeconfig"

# Deploy a prebuilt image and watch it converge.
kubectl apply -f examples/whoami-app.yaml
kubectl get apps.app.bex.co -w

An App reports the state an operator or agent needs without scraping logs:

NAME      PHASE     REVISION   URL
whoami    Running   rev-1      http://whoami.default.svc:8080

Then add a tenant machine and scale the workload across it:

bash scripts/mock-cluster.sh scale 2
kubectl patch apps.app.bex.co whoami --type merge -p '{"spec":{"replicas":6}}'
kubectl get pods -l app.bex.co/app=whoami -o wide

The first bootstrap downloads the Kubernetes and Cluster API dependencies and can take several minutes. For a full platform deployment, start with infra/README.md; for the Go workspace and development commands, see lego/README.md.

Use the interface that fits

All product adapters are thin