ADR 08: Openship as trial substrate

Self-hosted deployment platform, scoped to what it is uniquely good at.

Status: trial approved (2026-07-18), pending VPS

Context

Openship (github.com/oblien/openship, Apache-2.0) is an open-source, self-hostable deployment platform: push-to-deploy, previews, rollbacks, domains with SSL and DNS, provisioned databases, object storage, a built-in mail server with DKIM/SPF/DMARC, and control via CLI, dashboard, REST API, and MCP. Young project: docs in progress, multi-node and private networking still on the roadmap.

Decision

Trial it on one Hostinger VPS (their tested recommendation: open port 25, easy PTR records, both required for mail and blocked on PaaS). Scope: the mail server for fleet transactional email, and new per-client service spin-ups (starting with Listmonk). Client static sites stay on Vercel. iese stays on Railway.

Graduation test

If the box runs its workloads reliably for one to two months, consolidate Railway services onto it. If it stumbles, mail falls back to SES and nothing above the substrate changes.

Why not all-in now

Client production sites ride on reliability we get free from Vercel today. A young platform earns trust with non-critical workloads first. The MCP interface is a genuine strategic fit: agents provisioning per-client services is the model Backpack is built around.