Glossary
Canonical Notploy terms and their definitions.
A compact dictionary of the terms used across the documentation. Concept pages explain these in depth; this page is the quick reference.
Platform
Notploy — An open-source, self-hostable control plane for deploying and operating applications and databases on servers you own.
Control plane — Notploy itself: the dashboard, API, workers, PostgreSQL and Redis that store configuration and orchestrate deployments.
Data plane — Where workloads run: your applications, Compose stacks, databases and Traefik, on the Docker engine.
Deployment engine — The shared logic that builds, releases and tracks workloads. Identical across local, remote and Swarm topologies.
Model
Organization — The top-level tenant that owns projects, resources and members.
Member — A user with a role inside an organization.
Project — A group of related services managed together.
Environment — A named deployment context within a project (for example production, staging) with its own services and shared variables.
Service — A deployable unit inside a project and environment: an Application, a Database, or a Docker Compose stack.
Application — A service that runs a single container, built from a source or run from an image.
Compose — A service defined by a docker-compose.yml, running multiple containers.
Deployment — One immutable attempt to build and release a service.
Domain — A binding between a hostname and a service's container port, with optional TLS.
Resource — A shared infrastructure object (registry, S3 destination, DNS provider, certificate, SSH key, secrets provider, notification channel) consumed by services.
Server — An execution target where Notploy builds or runs workloads.
Local server — The machine where the Notploy control plane is installed.
Deployment server — A remote server that runs workloads.
Build server — A remote server that only builds images and pushes them to a registry.
Swarm node — A worker or manager node joined to the local server's Docker Swarm.
Features
Build type — How Notploy turns a source into a runnable image: Dockerfile, Nixpacks, Railpack, buildpacks, or a prebuilt image.
Registry — A container image registry from which builds push and deployments pull images.
S3 destination — An S3-compatible object storage target where backups are written and restored from.
Volume backup — A scheduled backup of a Docker named volume to an S3 destination.
Preview deployment — A temporary deployment created for a pull request or branch.
Rollback — Releasing a previously built deployment of a service.
Traefik — The reverse proxy that routes external traffic to services and terminates TLS.
Generated domain — A free traefik.me hostname provided for quick, HTTP-only testing.
Editions
Self-Hosted (OSS) — The free, Apache-2.0 edition you install and operate.
Cloud — The hosted edition where Notploy manages the control plane and you connect your own servers.
Enterprise — Licensed edition that adds SSO, SCIM, custom roles, audit logs and whitelabeling (Self-Hosted) or managed delivery (Cloud).
Console — The internal operator surface used to run Notploy Cloud. It is not covered in public documentation.
Status labels
Available — Implemented and verified. Experimental — Implemented but incomplete or subject to change. Planned — On the roadmap, not yet available. Unsupported — Out of scope.
Related
- Core concepts — the same terms, explained in context.
- Editions & scope — how editions differ.