Self-hosting overview

The Slipway control plane is source-available (FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0) and free to self-host on every tier. The runner, CLI and SDKs are Apache-2.0. You get the same product as Slipway Cloud, and your pipelines, secrets, logs and artifacts stay in your infrastructure.

Architecture

  Browser ──HTTP/2──▶ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  CLI / SDK ─Connect▶ │ server    Connect API, auth, webhooks, SPA, live log tail   │
  SCM webhooks ─────▶ │ scheduler trigger evaluation, DAG to jobs, queue, leases    │
                      │ worker    notifications, webhooks, retention, metering      │
                      └───────┬───────────┬───────────┬───────────┬────────────────┘
                              │           │           │           │
                         Postgres 17   NATS         S3-compatible  Valkey
                         (RLS by org)  JetStream    (logs,         (sessions,
                                       (queues,     artifacts,     rate limits)
                                        events)     caches)
   runners (shell | docker | kubernetes) ── outbound only ──▶ server

• One binary: slipway server | scheduler | worker | runner | all. all runs server, scheduler and worker in one process for development and small installs.
• Stateless components. Server, scheduler and worker scale horizontally. State lives in Postgres, NATS and object storage.
• Runners are separate and dial out. Put them next to the workloads they build and deploy.

Requirements

Dependency	Version	Notes
PostgreSQL	17	Primary and optional replicas. The app role is unprivileged so row-level security applies. Managed services (RDS, Cloud SQL, Azure Database) work
NATS	2.11 with JetStream	Clustered (3 nodes) for production
Object storage	Any S3 API	AWS S3, MinIO, R2, GCS via interoperability
Valkey (or Redis)	8	Sessions and rate limits. rediss:// for TLS
Compute		Small: 2 vCPU and 4 GB for everything. Production: 3 replicas of server, 2 each of scheduler and worker, sized from the Helm defaults
DNS and TLS		A public HTTPS URL (SLIPWAY_BASE_URL). Required for SCM webhooks and for OIDC federation

Deployment shapes

Shape	When	Guide
Laptop or single host with Compose	Evaluation, small teams	Compose
Kubernetes with the Helm chart	Production	Helm
Terraform reference stacks (AWS, GCP)	Production from scratch with managed services	Terraform
Binary plus your own dependencies	Bare metal, custom orchestration	Configuration

Operating it

• Configuration reference: every SLIPWAY_* setting.
• Upgrades: migrations and rollbacks.
• Backups: what to back up. The master key is critical.
• High availability: replicas, failure modes, scaling.
• Observability: metrics, traces, logs, health.

Licensing in practice

You can run, modify and use Slipway internally or to deliver your own software without restriction. You cannot offer it to third parties as a competing hosted service. Each release converts to Apache-2.0 two years after publication. Paid tiers on self-hosted installs add support, SLAs and features such as BYOK, change management and SAML/SCIM.