bex

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