I have a folder on my laptop called side-projects. Most of them are Dockerized. Most of them will never see more than a handful of users. And for years, every one of them hit the same wall: getting the thing onto a cheap VPS without losing a weekend — and copy-pasting my own past mistakes forward every single time.
Here's the opinion that eventually turned into a project: the part of a PaaS you touch most often should hold the least power over your server.
Think of a deploy tool as two planes. There's a read plane — dashboards, logs, container health, the stuff you stare at — where you spend most of your time and which is your most exposed surface. And there's a write plane — deploy, restart, the actions that actually change the system — which is rare and should be gated. My frustration was that the thing I looked at all day and the thing that could rewrite my box tended to sit on the same pile of privilege.
So I built Mooring to keep those two planes apart. It's an early, solo project, and this post is me showing it and asking for eyes on it.
The mental model
