LightShuttle

Lightweight dev orchestrator for polyglot teams: typed docker-compose successor with built-in dashboard, OpenTelemetry and production export.

LightShuttle (binary: lightshuttle) is a developer-time orchestrator written in Rust. You declare your service stack once in lightshuttle.yml (databases, queues, containers, Dockerfiles, static SPAs), 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 Encelade Technologies.

Status

🚧 Pre-alpha, no usable release yet.

The repository is intentionally public from day one to capture the name and make the design discussion visible. Do not depend on it yet, anything can change until v0.1.0.

Quickstart

Pre-alpha. The CLI works but everything below may change before v0.1.0.

Prerequisites: Docker Desktop or a Docker Engine daemon running locally, plus a Rust toolchain (rustup is the recommended installer).

Install LightShuttle from the cloned repository (it is not on crates.io yet):

git clone https://github.com/nubster-opensources/lightshuttle.git
cd lightshuttle
cargo install --path crates/lightshuttle

Once published, the install command will simply be cargo install lightshuttle.

Typing lightshuttle is verbose. If your shell has no lsh already (check with command -v lsh), see the optional shell alias section of the tutorial.

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

# lightshuttle.yml
project:
  name: hello
resources:
  db:
    postgres:
      version: "16"

Boot the stack:

$ lightshuttle up

The orchestrator 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.

For a complete walkthrough see docs/tutorial/getting-started.md. Runnable manifests live in examples/.

Why LightShuttle

docker-compose is the de facto local stack runner for polyglot teams, but it suffers from real ergonomic gaps that LightShuttle aims to close:

• No typing, a typo in a service name silently breaks the stack.
• No dashboard, you fall back to docker logs and docker ps for everything.
• No service discovery, you manually wire DATABASE_URL and REDIS_URL between containers.
• No production export, the same YAML cannot be reused or transformed into Kubernetes resources.
• No custom lifecycle, running a migration before serving traffic requires shell scripts and depends_on: service_healthy ceremonies.

LightShuttle keeps the simplicity of a single YAML file but layers type validation, a live dashboard, automatic environment variable injection between services, a clean extension point in Rust for custom hooks and lifecycles, and a first-class production export.

What LightShuttle is not

To stay focused, the following are explicitly out of scope:

• Not a production runtime. LightShuttle is a developer-time orchestrator. The production export targets Kubernetes, Helm or plain docker-compose, but LightShuttle itself does not run in production.
• Not a Kubernetes replacement. We generate manifests; we do not run a control plane.
• Not a service mesh. Service discovery is provided by environment variables and an optional local DNS; sidecar proxies, mTLS and traffic shaping are deliberately left to dedicated tools.
• Not a CI/CD pipeline. LightShuttle is orthogonal to GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or any other pipeline tool.

Configuration model

The primary configuration lives in lightshuttle.yml, a declarative manifest readable by every developer regardless of their primary language. For the 10 % of cases that need custom lifecycle logic, for example running a one-shot migration container before starting the long-running service, LightShuttle reuses the Cargo xtask/ pattern: a small Rust crate inside the project exposes hooks that the orchestrator calls at the right moments.

A minimal example will be added once the architecture phase finalises the YAML schema.

Contributing

LightShuttle is in pre-alpha and the public API is unstable. The repository is open so the design phase can happen in public, not so that external contributions can be accepted yet. Once v0.1.0 ships, the contribution model will be documented in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Until then, feel free to open a discussion if you want to give early feedback on the direction.

License

Licensed under either of:

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE)
• MIT License (LICENSE-MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual-licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for details, including the Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

Copyright © Encelade Technologies.