---
title: Introduction
category: Getting Started
slug: docs
---

Dequel is a self-hosted deployment platform. You connect your servers,
push code from Git or a ZIP file, and Dequel builds, runs, routes, and
monitors your apps — with automatic HTTPS, managed databases, horizontal
autoscaling, and AI-assisted failure diagnosis built in.

If you have used Heroku, Render, or Railway, Dequel gives you that same
push-to-deploy workflow on infrastructure you own. There is no control
plane phoning home: the dashboard, API, builders, and observability stack
all run as containers on your machine.

## How Dequel works

When you create a project and trigger a deployment:

1. Dequel fetches your code from a Git repository (or unpacks your ZIP
   upload) into a build workspace.
2. It detects your framework automatically with Railpack — no Dockerfile
   required — or follows your `docker-compose.yml` for multi-container
   projects, then builds the image with BuildKit.
3. It starts your container on the target server (the control plane
   itself, a server you connected over SSH, or a WireGuard agent node)
   and injects your environment variables and volume mounts.
4. It writes a Caddy route file so your app is reachable at
   `https://<project-slug>.<your-domain>` with an automatic Let's Encrypt
   certificate, or at `http://<project-slug>.localhost` in local setups.
5. It keeps watching: request logs, runtime logs, CPU and memory metrics,
   alert rules, and autoscaling policies all run against the deployment.

:::note[Key concept: projects]
A project in Dequel is a single service — its source, build settings,
environment variables, volumes, domains, scaling policy, alert rules,
and deployment history. Databases are separate managed resources you
attach to projects.
:::