What you are running

Toft is a single Go binary. It serves its own web interface, migrates its own schema, and clones, builds and runs the apps you give it.

Note

This guide is for whoever runs an install. Deploying apps is the user guide; toft and the app SDKs are the CLI & SDK guide. The Documentation page in Toft links to all three for your version.

The pieces

Piece	Role
The binary	Platform API, web interface, build pipeline, scheduler, app proxy.
Postgres 17	Everything Toft knows. The binary migrates the schema at startup.
A filesystem	Releases, logs, build caches.
PM2	Runs apps as processes (shared mode). Bundled in the image.
A cluster	Optional — only for isolated execution.

No app registry, build service or CI is required.

Three listeners

Listener	Serves	Present
PORT (:8080)	The platform	Always
APPS_PORT (:8081)	Deployed apps, on a different origin	Always
METRICS_ADDR	Prometheus scrape endpoint	Only when set

Metrics never live as a path on :8080. See Listeners, origins and proxies.

The boundary everything rests on

Apps are served on a different origin from the platform. That is what stops an app’s JavaScript from calling the platform API as the person viewing it. A single-origin install gives that up — see How apps are isolated.

Toft works out its own inbound address from each request. BASE_URL sets only outbound links, such as those in notification emails.

Configuration and settings

Kind	Where	Changed by
Configuration	Environment variables, read at startup	The operator, with a restart
Setting	Database rows, audited	An administrator, on the admin pages
Operating dial	Both: environment floor, setting override	Either

See Configuration and settings.

Four variables to start

DATABASE_URL, JWT_SECRET, ENCRYPTION_KEY and BASE_URL. Everything else has a default or switches on a capability you have not asked for. The full list is in the environment reference.