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distr-sh / distr

distr

The Open Source control plane for self-hosted, BYOC, and on-prem deployments. Everything you need to distribute applications to self-hosted customers out of the box. Supporting Docker Compose, Docker Swarm and Helm based applications.

2Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The Open Source control plane for self-hosted, BYOC, and on-prem deployments. Everything you need to distribute applications to self-hosted customers out of the box. Supporting Docker Compose, Docker Swarm and Helm based applications.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by week6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2026-02-04 16:01:46 UTC to 2026-05-05 12:04:38 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.

01232026-02-02 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-09 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 commentsFeb 22026-02-09 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-16 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2026-02-16 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-23 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-02-23 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-02 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-03-02 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-09 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-03-09 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-16 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-03-16 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-23 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsMar 162026-03-23 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-30 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-03-30 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-06 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-04-06 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-13 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-04-13 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-20 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-04-20 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-27 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-04-27 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-05-04 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-05-04 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-05-11 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsMay 4

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Feb 22026-02-02 00:00:00 UTC2026-02-09 00:00:00 UTC211
Feb 92026-02-09 00:00:00 UTC2026-02-16 00:00:00 UTC312
Feb 162026-02-16 00:00:00 UTC2026-02-23 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 232026-02-23 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-02 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 22026-03-02 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-09 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 92026-03-09 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-16 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 162026-03-16 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-23 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 232026-03-23 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-30 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 302026-03-30 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-06 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 62026-04-06 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-13 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 132026-04-13 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-20 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 202026-04-20 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-27 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 272026-04-27 00:00:00 UTC2026-05-04 00:00:00 UTC000
May 42026-05-04 00:00:00 UTC2026-05-11 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

6 sources
This is a problem we, as a company, have thought about a lot, but we always concluded that Kubernetes is already the simplest abstraction of a distributed system that is feasible for the diverse needs that the biggest companies out there have. We previously built a package manager for Kubernetes to abstract it in the simplest way possible `glasskube install app` but we failed because every abstraction needs to follow a "convention over configuration" pattern at some point. Also, we weren't able to monetize a package manager. With Distr (https://github.com/distr-sh/distr), we have actually been able to help companies not only package but distribute and either manage or give their customers a way to self-manage applications. Our customers are able to land on-premises contracts at enterprises way faster than before, which is also a clear ROI
Read the rest
for paying for Distr. So, I don't think that you can get the flexibility of a distributed application orchestrator with a simple declarative YAML file if your target environments are diverse.
In Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?
Sure, multiple of our customers that distribute applications with a machine learning/AI component also need to distribute their models. They can use our OCI registry to distribute large images with huge layers. We specifically reworked our registry implementation to storing in-transit blobs on disk to save memory, ensuring the application doesn’t run out of memory [1]. [1] https://github.com/distr-sh/distr/pull/1478
In Show HN: Distr 2.0 – A year of learning how to ship to customer environments

Show HN: Distr 2.0 – A year of learning how to ship to customer environments

A year ago, we launched Distr here to help software vendors manage customer deployments remotely. We had agents that pulled updates, a hub with a GUI, and a lot of assumptions about what on-prem deployment needed. It turned out things get messy when your software is running in places you can't simply SSH into. Over the last year, we’ve also helped modernize a lot of home-baked solutions: bash scripts that email when updates fail, Excel sheets nobody trusts to track customer versions, engineers driving to customer sites to fix things in person, debug sessions over email (“can you take a screenshot of the logs and send it to me?”), customers with access to internal AWS or GCP registries because there was no better option, and deployments two major versions behind that nobody wants to touch. We waited a year before making our first breaking
Read the rest
change, which led to a major SemVer update—but it was eventually necessary. We needed to completely rewrite how we manage customer organizations. In Distr, we differentiate between vendors and customers. A vendor is typically the author of a software / AI application that wants to distribute it to customers. Previously, we had taken a shortcut where every customer was just a single user who owned a deployment. We’ve now introduced customer organizations. Vendors onboard customer organizations onto the platform, and customers own their internal user management, including RBAC. This change obviously broke our API, and although the migration for our cloud customers was smooth, custom solutions built on top of our APIs needed updates. Other notable features we’ve implemented since our first launch: - An OCI container registry built on an adapted version of https://github.com/google/go-containerregistry/, directly embedded into our codebase and served via a separate port from a single Docker image. This allows vendors to distribute Docker images and other OCI artifacts if customers want to self-manage deployments. - License Management to restrict which customers can access which applications or artifact versions. Although “license management” is a broadly used term, the main purpose here is to codify contractual agreements between vendors and customers. In its simplest form, this is time-based access to specific software versions, which vendors can now manage with Distr. - Container logs and metrics you can actually see without SSH access. Internally, we debated whether to use a time-series database or store all logs in Postgres. Although we had to tinker quite a bit with Postgres indexes, it now runs stably. - Secret Management, so database passwords don’t show up in configuration steps or logs. Distr is now used by 200+ vendors, including Fortune 500 companies, across on-prem, GovCloud, AWS, and GCP, spanning health tech, fintech, security, and AI companies. We’ve also started working on our first air-gapped environment. For Distr 3.0, we’re working on native Terraform / OpenTofu and Zarf support to provision and update infrastructure in customers’ cloud accounts and physical environments—empowering vendors to offer BYOC and air-gapped use cases, all from a single platform. Distr is fully open source and self-hostable: https://github.com/distr-sh/distr Docs: https://distr.sh/docs We’re YC S24. Happy to answer questions about on-prem deployments and would love to hear about your experience with complex customer deployments.
101 points · Open discussion
Thanks. If you are referring to how we handle large OCI images for our OCI-compatible container registry, we create a temporary volume and stream/cache the layers there before streaming them to S3-compatible storage. This mitigates the need to keep large layers in memory, which previously led to memory resource exhaustion. If want to dig even deeper, this specific implementation was done in this pr: https://github.com/distr-sh/distr/pull/1478
In Show HN: Distr 2.0 – A year of learning how to ship to customer environments
louis_w_gk·Feb 4, 2026Submission

Show HN: Distr 2.0 – A year of learning how to ship to customer environments

A year ago, we launched Distr here to help software vendors manage customer deployments remotely. We had agents that pulled updates, a hub with a GUI, and a lot of assumptions about what on-prem deployment needed. It turned out things get messy when your software is running in places you can't simply SSH into. Over the last year, we’ve also helped modernize a lot of home-baked solutions: bash scripts that email when updates fail, Excel sheets nobody trusts to track customer versions, engineers driving to customer sites to fix things in person, debug sessions over email (“can you take a screenshot of the logs and send it to me?”), customers with access to internal AWS or GCP registries because there was no better option, and deployments two major versions behind that nobody wants to touch. We waited a year before making our first breaking
Read the rest
change, which led to a major SemVer update—but it was eventually necessary. We needed to completely rewrite how we manage customer organizations. In Distr, we differentiate between vendors and customers. A vendor is typically the author of a software / AI application that wants to distribute it to customers. Previously, we had taken a shortcut where every customer was just a single user who owned a deployment. We’ve now introduced customer organizations. Vendors onboard customer organizations onto the platform, and customers own their internal user management, including RBAC. This change obviously broke our API, and although the migration for our cloud customers was smooth, custom solutions built on top of our APIs needed updates. Other notable features we’ve implemented since our first launch: - An OCI container registry built on an adapted version of https://github.com/google/go-containerregistry/, directly embedded into our codebase and served via a separate port from a single Docker image. This allows vendors to distribute Docker images and other OCI artifacts if customers want to self-manage deployments. - License Management to restrict which customers can access which applications or artifact versions. Although “license management” is a broadly used term, the main purpose here is to codify contractual agreements between vendors and customers. In its simplest form, this is time-based access to specific software versions, which vendors can now manage with Distr. - Container logs and metrics you can actually see without SSH access. Internally, we debated whether to use a time-series database or store all logs in Postgres. Although we had to tinker quite a bit with Postgres indexes, it now runs stably. - Secret Management, so database passwords don’t show up in configuration steps or logs. Distr is now used by 200+ vendors, including Fortune 500 companies, across on-prem, GovCloud, AWS, and GCP, spanning health tech, fintech, security, and AI companies. We’ve also started working on our first air-gapped environment. For Distr 3.0, we’re working on native Terraform / OpenTofu and Zarf support to provision and update infrastructure in customers’ cloud accounts and physical environments—empowering vendors to offer BYOC and air-gapped use cases, all from a single platform. Distr is fully open source and self-hostable: https://github.com/distr-sh/distr Docs: https://distr.sh/docs We’re YC S24. Happy to answer questions about on-prem deployments and would love to hear about your experience with complex customer deployments.
4 points · Open discussion

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