> It also cleanly stores data for all apps in a single data/ directory, so you always have one directory that holds all the state, which you can easily back up and restore.

Ha! I'm store my data in /data for ages. The only difference is what at first I bothered with tinkering with datadir paths in configuration files, nowadays I just symlink /var/lib/whatsitsname to /data/whatsitsname. I'm lazy and boring.

Funny I did something similar but only much easier. A cron job that ran every 5 minutes doing a git pull on the production branch and since it was a PHP stack the new version was live instantly without needing rebuild or restart of any service

It's basically a oneliner in bash. KISS

That's good when you only want updates, but I wanted to be able to launch new services on the server by just pushing a new YAML file to git. Harbormaster does it wonderfully, and it lets me see exactly what's running on the server and how with one look at the YAML.

I can also back everything up by just copying one directory, so that's great too.

This to me is boring and simple technology. Well done.

Thank you! I really like it, it's been working great for a while now, with no hiccups.