sitectl

Command line utility to interact with your local and remote Docker Compose sites.

Overview

sitectl was made with LAC-GLAM institutions at top of mind. sitectl is a command line utility to operate your local and remote sites.

Scaling Human Operators

The philosophy behind sitectl is not to help scale operations in the traditional technological sense of the word, but rather to scale human operators. As more institutions run their own instances of an OSS project, the resulting increase in contributors triggers a virtuous cycle of growth.

By making the operation of the Docker containers needed to run an application well-defined through common, repeatable patterns using the spec, sitectl’s value prop is:

• Empower institutions: Giving organizations the capability and confidence to reliably host the software they depend on without relying soley on a dedicated DevOps team.
• Empower individual contributors: Providing teams with solid, standardized tooling that eliminates environmental toil and lets them focus on the work that matters.

sitectl Features

Interactive operations

Use the for routine site setup, monitoring, and operator workflows.

Contexts

Track local and remote environments so sitectl can understand where a site lives and how to reach it.

Plugins

Add stack-specific behavior for common technologies without abandoning the core workflow.

Components

Model reviewed stack defaults and operator choices in a more structured way than ad hoc notes.

Why not just use Docker Contexts?

While Docker’s native context feature handles basic docker daemon connections, sitectl is purpose-built for projects and adds:

Remote operations

SFTP file operations, sudo support, and clearer SSH error handling.

Container utilities

General helpers to do things like resolve service names to containers, extract secrets and env vars for exec commands, and inspect container network details.

Automatically set the equivalent of DOCKER_HOST, COMPOSE_PROJECT_NAME, COMPOSE_FILE, and COMPOSE_ENV_FILES from the active sitectl context.

Why not make kube operators?

Though isn’t designed for massive-scale orchestration, the applications hosted by most LAC-GLAM institutions rarely require more than modest scaling. The real advantage of is the developer experience. Because the exact same orchestration runs in both development and production - with only minor environmental tweaks - you can reliably mirror production on your local machine. This provides built-in deployment safety long before your CI pipeline runs a single test.

We could have spent our resources building Kubernetes operators for various LAC-GLAM stacks instead of creating sitectl. But sitectl was a deliberate choice: it empowers institutions to adopt open-source projects without the hurdle of hiring a k8s admin or absorbing the heavy operational overhead of a Kubernetes cluster.