If you have a couple of VMs to look after (a cheap VPS, a home lab, a Raspberry Pi), you probably know the drill: remote copy files over, SSH in, restart a process, tail logs, then do it again on the next VM.

The other thing you usually want is predictability: the same deploy steps every time, with the same runtime version, without relying on “whatever happens to be installed” on a box.

Docker can solve some of that, but it can also be overkill for simple projects. Not every project needs a container - sometimes you just want to run a simple Node.js, PHP, Java, or Python app directly on the VM. For those cases, Dployr gives you a programmable deployment workflow (blueprints) for VMs. Docker amongst other runtimes e.g Node.js, PHP, Java, Python etc. is supported, but it is treated as one runtime option, not a requirement.

Get started: https://github.com/dployr-io/dployr