CLANKER.NET docs

CLANKER.NET gives every engineer on your team a ready-made development environment — a pod — on a host in your own cloud accounts, built from the repositories you already have. Nothing of yours passes through us: the replicator runs from your repository, with your credentials, and we hold none of them.

Start with a prompt. CLANKER.NET is agent-first: setting it up is one prompt for the coding agent you already use, and every step is a command it can run. Access is by request, because the engine and its images are private. → Set it up with your agent

How it fits together

Three files, two owners, one host — plus one optional file per repository for its own staging, production and sites:

flowchart LR
  subgraph team["Your team's repositories"]
    dc["<b>Dev-container file</b><br/>one per repository<br/><i>what a container of this repo is</i>"]
  end
  subgraph owner["The host owner's repository"]
    fleet["<b>Fleet file</b><br/>one per host<br/><i>which repos, at which ref, who may hold them</i>"]
    host["<b>Host spec</b><br/><i>where it runs — by name, never a secret value</i>"]
    caller["<b>Workflow</b><br/>one job that calls ours"]
  end
  subgraph cloud["Your cloud accounts"]
    machine["<b>Host</b><br/>reverse proxy · private network · tunnel"]
    podA["Pod: alice"]
    podB["Pod: bob"]
  end
  dc --> fleet
  fleet --> caller
  host --> caller
  caller -- "provision / sync / select" --> machine
  machine --- podA
  machine --- podB

• A dev-container file (.devcontainer/devcontainer.json) sits in each repository, owned by the team that builds in it. It is the standard file any editor understands; the few things the standard cannot say go under customizations.replicator. → The dev-container file
• A fleet file (clanker.yml) sits in the host owner’s repository and says which repositories every pod on that host holds, at which ref, and who may hold them. → The fleet file
• A host spec (hosts/<name>.yml) says where — which accounts, which network, where state and secrets live — naming every credential, never holding one. → Host specs
• An environments file (replicator.config.ts) is optional, sits in any repository that needs its own staging, production, static sites or storage, and is run by the same engine, one stage at a time. It is separate from the dev-container file (which says what a workspace is) and from the fleet file (which says which repositories a host runs): the three describe different things and none replaces another. → Environments

The host owner runs the host up once. Each engineer provisions once and gets a pod: one container per repository with a dev-container file, a shared clone of each one without, one public name, one address on your private network, and an ssh port per repository. Switching which repository the public name shows takes seconds and restarts nothing.

Start here

The pages describe what the replicator does for you, not what it is built from; a literal key or value appears where a reference needs it.