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Onebox

What Onebox is

Onebox is the production-operations layer for an application intentionally running on one server. It supplies typed perception, bounded intent, durable state, exact approval, and a fenced execution engine — so that releasing, recovering, and maintaining that application is something a person or an agent can do without assembling it from shell scripts.

The ownership boundary

Section titled “The ownership boundary”

You own your application containers. Onebox owns everything else on the box.

Host provisioning, the container runtime, the proxy, TLS, networks, release staging, supporting data services, and scheduled jobs are not your application, and therefore not your problem.

That sentence is the direction, not an inventory. Owned today:

  • host bootstrap and the container runtime check
  • the proxy and its TLS
  • the shared network
  • release staging and retention
  • supporting data services and their credentials
  • scheduled jobs

Not owned today: backups, restore proof, and log rotation. Onebox says so rather than implying otherwise.

Scope

Section titled “Scope”

One application per environment, on one active production host. That application may have as many workloads as it needs — a server, workers, jobs, databases, caches, a proxy — but the unit Onebox owns is the application, and a host runs one of them.

That last part is enforced, not advisory. ob bootstrap writes an owner record on the host, and every command that changes anything checks it first. Point a second application at the same machine and it refuses before touching anything:

host is owned by application "shop"; application "blog" cannot mutate it

The record is released only when nothing of the application is left: volumes removed, and the proxy removed too if this application manages it. Keeping it while data survives is deliberate — ownership is what lets you come back and run ob destroy --volumes, and a host released early is one whose remaining volumes its owner can no longer reach. ob destroy tells you which command releases it. ob preflight reports the current owner, and passes on a host nobody has claimed yet.

Onebox is not:

  • a cluster manager, Kubernetes replacement, PaaS, or hosting provider
  • a multi-host or multi-region orchestrator
  • a way to run several independent applications side by side on one host
  • a generic Docker dashboard, terminal, or remote shell
  • a universal infrastructure-as-code language
  • a guarantee of availability after losing the only host
  • a guarantee that arbitrary migrations or external effects can be undone

The interface is the CLI

Section titled “The interface is the CLI”

The CLI is the product interface, for people and for agents. It is not a fallback or a transitional path.

There is no MCP surface. A read-only tool list constrains nothing when every mutation goes through the CLI anyway and the agent can run ob deploy in a shell — the boundary it appears to provide does not exist. Point an agent at the ob binary the way you would point it at git or gh.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”