cast/README.md

cast

Point it at a repo and a state directory; it makes a Coolify instance match what the repo declares. One-way, idempotent, never deletes.

Philosophy (shared with rig and claudebox): public tool, private state. cast holds no hostnames, no bindings, no secrets, nothing about your infrastructure. It reads what you point it at and stores nothing, ever.

rig builds the boxes. cast fills them.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/heavy-duty/cast/main/install.sh | bash

Needs node >= 22.12 and age (secrets are decrypted by shelling out to it). Re-run any time to upgrade. Unlike rig — which is pure bash so it can run on a bare box — cast runs on your machine: it is an API client, and a server should never install it.

The installer symlinks cast into ~/.local/bin (or /usr/local/bin as root) and, if that directory is not already on your PATH, appends it to your shell profile — .zshrc, .bashrc/.bash_profile, or config.fish, whichever your $SHELL reads — marked # added by cast-install and written only once. The shell you ran the installer from does not inherit it (a curl | bash pipeline is a subshell), so open a new shell or source the profile it names. Set CAST_NO_MODIFY_PATH=1 to be left alone and wire PATH yourself.

The two inputs

cast joins a manifest (what to deploy) with state (where, and with what values). Neither knows about the other, which is the whole point: a manifest can live in a product repo without leaking your infrastructure, and your infrastructure can be re-pointed at a new Coolify without touching a product.

1. The product repo's .infra/ — committed, instance-blind:

.infra/
  manifest.yaml                  # applications, databases, services, per environment
  env/<app>.<env>.env.template   # var NAMES + non-secret values; ${SECRET} placeholders

2. A state directory — private, yours:

environments.yaml               # bindings: the team each env's token must belong to,
                                #   which server it deploys onto, the S3 destination,
                                #   GitHub App name, smoke target, guards
secrets/<repo>.<env>.env.age    # age-encrypted values for the ${…} placeholders
.coolify.env                    # COOLIFY_BASE_URL + COOLIFY_ACCESS_TOKEN (never commit)
.coolify/<name>.env             # …the same, for a NAMED instance (see below)

Pass it with --state <dir>, or set CAST_STATE. Defaults to the cwd.

Commands

cast apply   <org>/<repo> --env <env> [--path <dir>] [--hostname-overlay <file>]
cast diff    <org>/<repo> --env <env> [--full]
cast capture <org>/<repo> --env <env> [--generated <NAME>] [--override <NAME>]
cast server add <name> --ip <ip> --key <file> --env <env> [--user root] [--port 22]
cast smoke --env <env>
cast team [--env <env>]

• apply — idempotent create-or-update of every manifest resource, then redeploy what changed. One-way: it never deletes a resource that Coolify has and the manifest doesn't. Clones the repo's default branch unless --path points at a local checkout (refused with --env prod — prod always reads the default branch).
• diff — reports drift, manifest → Coolify. Structural by default; --full also compares env vars. Exits non-zero when dirty, so CI can gate on it.
• capture — the adoption path: reads a hand-built instance's live env and writes the environment's age store from it. See Adopting a hand-built instance below.
• server add — uploads a server's private key and registers it with Coolify.
• smoke — contract test against smoke_target: proves Coolify's bulk env endpoint still upserts rather than replacing. Run it after every Coolify upgrade — apply's never-delete guarantee rests on that behavior, and the published OpenAPI does not describe it accurately.
• team — prints the team the configured token acts as. With --env, also checks it against that environment's team: binding and exits non-zero on a mismatch — the dry run for "would apply refuse?", answered without touching anything.

Every command that reaches a live Coolify takes an --env, because every one of them first asserts the token's team (below).

--hostname-overlay swaps domains for a pre-flight run against temporary hostnames; re-applying without it is the cutover.

Cloning: cast authenticates, and never prompts

apply, diff and capture clone the product repo (unless --path points at a local checkout — refused for prod, which always reads the default branch). For a private repo that needs credentials, and cast resolves them itself:

1. gh, borrowed as a credential helper for that one invocation — it does not touch your global git config.
2. GITHUB_TOKEN / GH_TOKEN from the environment (the CI path).
3. Whatever git's own credential helper does, if you have one.

Being logged into gh is enough. You do not need gh auth setup-git — that separate act is what wires git's helper, and not running it is exactly how you end up at git's interactive username/password prompt, which GitHub no longer accepts. cast sets GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT=0 on every path, so it can never hang there or hide a credentials failure behind an error about the repository. With no credentials at all it says so, and names the fix.

The token is never put in the clone URL or in http.extraheader — both leak it into ps, and the latter persists it into the clone's git config.

Many Coolifys

--instance <name> reads <state>/.coolify/<name>.env instead of <state>/.coolify.env. Every verb that reaches Coolify takes it.

cast diff heavy-duty/incubator --env prod --full --instance legacy

An environment can bind one, so --env selects the right control plane with no flag at all:

environments:
  prod:
    server: prod-box
    team: { id: 1, name: heavy-duty }
    instance: prod-cp        # → <state>/.coolify/prod-cp.env

An explicit --instance still wins, so a one-off read against a legacy box needs no edit to that file either. With no flag and no binding, nothing changes — .coolify.env is read exactly as before.

Two properties, both deliberate:

• An unknown --instance refuses, and names the instances that do exist. Falling back to the default is how a diff meant for a legacy box gets run against production.
• An instance may declare COOLIFY_READ_ONLY=true, and then apply, smoke and server add refuse it — before their first call, and even though the token itself would permit the writes. That turns "I pointed the wrong token at the wrong box" from a live incident into an exit code.

Every command that reaches a Coolify now says which one, next to the team assert. It is the most consequential input to any run, and the least visible.

Adopting a hand-built instance

cast is otherwise scoped to the steady state: manifest → Coolify, forever. capture is the one-way-in — it bootstraps an environment's age store from an instance that was built by hand, before any manifest existed.

CAST_CAPTURE_ADMIN_EMAIL=me@example.com \
  cast capture heavy-duty/incubator --env prod --instance legacy \
    --override ADMIN_EMAIL

It reads the required secret names from the manifest's own env templates (the ${…} refs — the manifest already declares exactly this set), reads the live values off the instance, and classifies every name:

captured	found live, value taken
generated	the manifest's generated_secrets declares it provider-made → written as the literal pending-coolify-generated, never the live value
overridden	supplied by you, for a value that must not be carried over
missing	required by a template, absent live → refuses

Then it prints a plan of names and provenance — never values — and waits for you to type the environment's name.

The mapping is not mechanical, and that is the whole design. A DATABASE_URL copied off the source box points at the source box's Postgres: confidently wrong, entirely plausible, and the target's real URL does not exist until Coolify creates the resource. So the manifest declares those names, and cast placeholds them:

environments:
  prod:
    generated_secrets: [DATABASE_URL_PROD, REDIS_URL_PROD, UMAMI_DATABASE_URL]

It is a manifest property rather than a flag you have to remember, because the manifest is what knows DATABASE_URL comes from a database it declares. (A generated_secrets entry no template refers to is a schema error — a guard standing over nothing is worse than no guard, because it reads like one. --generated <NAME> covers a manifest that hasn't declared them yet.)

An --override's value is read from $CAST_CAPTURE_<NAME>, never from the command line: argv is visible in ps to every process on the box. It exists for values that must not survive the copy — staging and prod sharing a Mailgun domain means a staging box carrying the real ADMIN_EMAIL can mail real users.

The store is encrypted to the environment's age_recipient (add it to environments.yaml — it's the public half, safe to commit). Plaintext goes to age on stdin: it is never a temp file, never on stdout, never in your shell history. An existing store is not overwritten without --force.

docs/semantics.md is the contract behind those commands: what apply guarantees (never deletes, never recreates a database, fails loudly rather than recreating on un-updatable drift), the dockercompose build pack, the hostname-overlay shapes, and the places Coolify 4.1.2 does not cooperate — each citation verified against coollabsio/coolify v4.1.2 and the vendored OpenAPI in reference/. Read it before changing apply.

Secrets, and attended applies

An environment's age identity is resolved in exactly two ways:

1. $CAST_AGE_KEY_FILE_<ENV> — injected for this invocation
2. ~/.config/cast/age-<env>.key — a standing key on this machine

That is the whole mechanism behind attended vs unattended applies: an environment whose key you never leave on disk can only be applied by someone who injects it. Keep a standing key for staging if you like; keep prod's in a password manager and pass it per apply.

The state directory holds ciphertext. It must never hold the identity that opens it.

Teams: the one assert cast makes before it touches anything

Coolify API tokens are team-scoped, and a token pointed at another team's resources does not error. The API resolves what the token cannot see to null — and to a tool like cast, null is indistinguishable from "this resource does not exist yet", which is an invitation to create it. An apply run with a wrong-team token would not fail; it would silently provision a duplicate set of resources into the wrong team, on whatever server that team owns. Silent, mutating, discovered late.

So every environment declares the team its token must belong to, and cast refuses to do anything at all until it has checked:

environments:
  prod:
    server: prod-box
    team: { id: 1, name: heavy-duty }

Give id, name, or both — both are compared when both are given. id is the true identity (names can be renamed); name is what makes the file readable. Run cast team to print the values for the token you currently have configured.

The check is fail-closed: an environment with no team: is one whose token cannot be verified, so it is a schema error, not a warning. It runs before the first read, not merely before the first write — an unasserted diff against the wrong team would report "everything is absent", which is precisely the lie that an apply would then act on.

Nothing below the team scopes a token. A Coolify environment has no team of its own (it hangs off a project) and no API path scopes by one: Coolify environments are an organizational construct, not an auth boundary. The team is the only boundary there is, so it is the one cast asserts.

Guarding an environment

An environment may refuse variables by name pattern:

environments:
  prod:
    server: prod-box
    team: { id: 1, name: heavy-duty }
    forbidden_var_patterns: ["^ALLOW_"]

apply then refuses if any such var is present on any resource, regardless of value. ALLOW_SEED=false still fails: a var that exists can be flipped on later in the Coolify UI without touching a manifest, so "off" has to mean absent.

This guard lives in your private state deliberately — not in the product's manifest. A product-side change must not be able to lower its own guard.

Scripts

Operational helpers, all argument-driven (scripts/): register a GitHub App with Coolify, restore a database backup into a target container.

They run where cast runs — off the box. They drive the Coolify API, or reach a box over SSH; none of them expects to be executing on a server. Anything that belongs on a box, as root, under a scheduler is rig's job, not cast's — including the nightly age-encrypted dump of the control-plane database, which is now rig coolify backup install.

Development

npm ci && npm run build && npm test
npm run check          # biome