Webapp Management for Internal Tools
Platform for securely developing and deploying web tools across a team.
Application server for containerized webapps. Create and share webapps for CLI applications.
What is Clace?
Clace™ is an Apache-2.0 licensed platform for securely developing and deploying internal tools easily. Clace makes it possible to easily build and share webapps exposing CLI tools and API points. Clace implements an AppServer allowing management of containerized web apps written in any language/framework. Clace is cross-platform across Linux/Windows/OSX.
How does it work?
Clace builds webapps based on app specification, without requiring any frontend code to be written. Clace also implements a language/framework agnostic application server. Clace combines the functionality of a reverse proxy and a container orchestrator (using Docker or Podman) in a single lightweight binary, providing a GitOps interface for app management.
What can it be used for?
Use Clace to expose simple auto-generated webapps for existing CLI tools and API endpoints. Apps built in low-code frameworks like Streamlit/Gradio/FastHTML etc can be easily deployed using Clace. For all deployed apps, Clace provides GitOps, blue-green staged deployment, OAuth access control, TLS cert management, secrets management etc.
Autogenerated web-apps
Auto generate simple web interfaces for existing CLI tools and API endpoints.
Container management
Build and deploy containerized webapps, with Docker or Podman.
GitOps Workflow
Blue-green (staged) deployments, versioning and preview environments with no infra to manage.
No build step
Backend and frontend development with no build artifacts to manage, deploy directly from the source repo.
Scale down to zero
Apps are initialized lazily, on demand: scale down to zero automatically.
Cross-platform
Clace runs natively on Linux, Windows and OSX; use for app dev and then for app hosting
Comparison with other tools
Open source PaaS solutions are built on top of reverse proxies (Traefik/Nginx) and work on Linux only. They support prod deployment only, not use in dev. They aim to be a simplified Kubernetes, providing pre-packaged apps, including support for deploying stateful applications like databases.
Clace is simpler because it does not aim to be a PaaS solution. Compared to other AppServers, Clace supports all languages and does not require any code changes in the app. Running in containers gives better isolation across apps. Clace is a single binary and runs natively on all platforms.
Comparison with cloud services
Google Cloud Run/AWS AppRunner allow easy deployment of containerized web apps. They run outside your infrastructure, making it difficult to talk to your existing systems. When deploying multiple small apps, cost can become a factor, especially when larger instances are required.
Clace provides a similar easy to use interface, including scale down to zero, on your own hardware. Hundred of apps can be hosted on a single Clace serve. Apps are lazy-initialized and scale down to zero when idle. Costs are fixed, there are no unexpected bills when API volume increases.
How is Clace different?
Clace provides a Cloud Run type experience on your hardware. Code and config changes are blue-green staged for deployment. Multiple apps can be updated atomically (all-or-nothing), no broken state after deployment failures.
Clace is built for the application management lifecycle across a team, not just the initial installation. Clace has OAuth support and security sand-boxing features which allow operations teams to easily manage applications through GitOps while allowing development teams to freely make code changes.