Introduction

What Spunto Lite is, what it runs on, and how these docs are organised.

Spunto Lite is a local control plane for development environments. It is one container that talks to your machine’s Docker daemon: you describe a project once — a base image, devcontainer features, the repositories to clone, ports, lifecycle hooks, secrets — and launch disposable workers from it. Each worker is a Docker container with VS Code in the browser (code-server) on its own subdomain, a persistent terminal, and your own SSH key so that git clone and git push just work.

On top of that, Lite can hand a worker to a coding agent — Claude Code, Codex or Mistral Vibe — and let you review what it did before you accept it.

It is the Build pillar of Spunto, collapsed onto a single machine. It is released under the MIT license, and the image is public on GitHub Container Registry.

What you need

Docker — Docker Desktop on macOS or Windows, Docker Engine on Linux — with its socket at /var/run/docker.sock.
Port 80 free on the host. Another port works too, at the cost of a :port in every URL.
A browser. *.localhost resolves to 127.0.0.1 on its own in Chrome, Edge and Firefox, so there is no DNS to set up.
Optionally, an SSH key in ~/.ssh that your git host accepts.

The image is published for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 (Apple Silicon included).

The vocabulary

Word	Means
Project	A devcontainer-style spec: base image, features, extensions, repositories, ports, hooks, secrets. Versioned.
Worker	A container built from a project: a private `/workspace` volume, code-server, terminals. Disposable.
Image build	The project’s image, built once per version and reused by every worker of that version.
Service	A long-lived shared container (Postgres, Redis…) that every worker reaches by name.
Secret	An encrypted value injected as an environment variable — global, or per project.
Task	Work delegated to an agent, in a worker of the project’s pool, that ends in a review.

How it works, in one paragraph

A single Next.js process serves the dashboard and reverse-proxies the workers’ subdomains. It drives Docker through the socket for the workers’ lifecycle only — create, start, stop, remove, build. Inside each worker runs a small agent (the same one a Spunto Cloud sandbox runs) that dials back to Lite over a WebSocket and carries everything else: commands, terminals, listening ports, the progress of the setup. Projects, workers and secrets live in SQLite, in one Docker volume. Nothing leaves your machine.

Where to go next

Installation — run it, with docker run or compose.
Quick start — from an empty dashboard to an editor in three minutes.
Agents — delegate a task to Claude Code, Codex or Mistral Vibe.
Security — read this before exposing Lite to anything but localhost.