nibrunner is one binary, nibrunnerd, that turns a Linux machine with /dev/kvm into a microVM host. You describe the apps you want in a JSON document; it boots each one in its own Firecracker microVM and keeps them that way.

• Sleep/wake policies — an app nobody is visiting is snapshotted and suspended; the next request wakes it. Which apps sleep, and after how long, is the document's to say, so a machine that runs a few dozen apps at once holds hundreds.
• Backups and snapshots — a volume in an object store outlives the machine it ran on. A checkpoint cuts it at a point in time; an export bundles it, and the app's environment, as an archive you can start another volume from.
• HTTPS — a proxy routes each hostname to its app, terminating TLS with the certificate you give it or serving plain HTTP behind an edge that does. Ports beside HTTP — ssh, DNS, WireGuard — are carried unread, tcp or udp, and wake a sleeping app like a request would.
• Custom image — an app's root is a stack of layers over the Debian guest image nibrunner ships: a bare executable the host packs into an image, or a squashfs or ext4 you built yourself. A volume can start from an archive rather than empty.
• Logs and metrics — every app's output in a file of its own, and a Prometheus page for the host rendered from the same state the daemon reports.

Quick start

A Linux x86_64 machine with /dev/kvm — bare metal, or a VPS whose provider passes hardware virtualisation through — running Debian or Ubuntu with systemd. As root:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ilbertt/nibrunner/main/deploy/install.sh | sh

That installs the packages and the release, checked against the digests it publishes, and lays the host out from /etc/nibrunner/config.toml — writing one if there is none: volumes as files on this disk, plain HTTP on :80, nothing in an object store. It starts nothing. Edit the file if you want to, then:

nibrunnerd start

Then put a binary in the artifact store, write the document nibrunnerd watches, and the daemon boots it, watches its health, and routes its hostname to it: deploy an app.

Documentation

nibrunner.dev/docs — the source is under docs/.

• Getting started — install, deploy an app, configure the host.
• Guides — layers, volumes, sleep and wake, health checks, HTTPS, raw ports, logs and metrics, host capacity.
• Reference — config.toml, desired.json and reported.json, key by key from their JSON Schemas.

Contributing

.github/CONTRIBUTING.md — the tools, the two test lanes, what CI checks, and how a pull request lands.