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Intro

Tako is an opinionated development and deployment tool for self-hosted apps. It focuses on fast defaults for local HTTPS development and remote deploys, with routes, secrets, and logs, without a giant matrix of knobs.

The Why

Tako started from one simple question: why did deploying become so dramatic?

The mission is simple: bring back the old upload and go energy, but with modern safety rails.

  • Ship changes quickly.
  • See results fast.
  • Keep your flow instead of fighting platform glue.

Tako is built to make local development smooth and production deploys boring (the good kind of boring).

What Tako Does Well

  • Rolling deploys with health-based traffic shifts, no babysitting required.
  • Zero-downtime server updates — one command and tako handles the handoff.
  • Built-in load balancer. Scales down to 0, scales up as far as you need.
  • Was it 3000? 5000? Or 8081? With Tako, local setup is portless on https://*.test (RFC 6761).
  • Remote production routes are HTTPS by default (HTTP redirects to HTTPS).
  • Subdomains? Custom path routes? Done.
  • Serves static files from your app’s public folder.
  • Secrets and variables per environment. Scoped and ready.
  • Runtime status and log inspection via CLI.

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Who Tako Is For

  • Builders and entrepreneurs who want predictable pricing and predictable performance.
  • Teams that want shipping to feel boring and reliable, not risky and ceremonial.
  • Teams that are done with surprise invoices and random “how is this $46,485.99?” moments.
  • People who want a runtime they control, without arbitrary platform limits.
  • Folks running lots of low-traffic apps: instances can scale to 0 and start on demand.
  • Yes, even “a ton of apps on a tiny VPS” territory, if most of them are idle most of the time.
  • Anyone tired of bloated tools and config files that feel like a second full-time job.

Tech

  • Built with Rust to be fast, reliable, and memory-safe.
  • Minimal resource footprint is a core principle.
  • Built on Pingora, Cloudflare’s Rust proxy library (Apache-2.0) that powers Cloudflare and is known for high performance.

Ok, So Where Do I Sign?

Easy. Start here: