Introduction
Core concepts
LiveA glossary and mental model for projects, stacks, templates, nodes, databases, deployments, and operations.
Goal
Give new users enough vocabulary to understand the rest of the docs.
Current status
Live
This area is documented as current, user-reliable behavior.
Workflow
- 1Learn the difference between project deployments and stack deployments.
- 2Treat templates as stack blueprints, not as a separate runtime engine.
- 3Treat nodes as schedulable runtime hosts, not as dashboard-only records.
- 4Treat operations as the cross-resource health and recovery surface.
Objects you manage
- Project: an app deployment unit, usually GitHub- or image-based.
- Stack: a Compose-defined service unit, often stateful or service-oriented.
- Template: a versioned blueprint that renders into a stack.
- Node: a connected machine running the StackShift agent.
- Database: a managed database resource with its own lifecycle and recovery behavior.
Operational language
- Placement: where a workload is scheduled.
- Maintenance: a node state used before upgrades or disruptive host actions.
- Recovery state: the current retry / cleanup / manual-attention state for an operation.
- Template provenance: the recorded template version and inputs used to deploy a stack.
Expected result
Terms used across the dashboard and docs feel consistent instead of ambiguous.