Introduction

If you deploy software to Linux servers, niso gives you everything Docker does — isolation, networking, volumes, multi-service composition — without the Docker daemon, layered images, or container runtime.

Processes run as regular systemd services. Packages contain your code and all its dependencies. Language runtimes (Node.js, Python, Ruby) are installed once on the host and bind-mounted into a fully isolated rootfs at activation — the process cannot see the host filesystem.

Deploy a Rust HTTP server in under a minute:

niso has three core ideas that differentiate it from Docker:

1. Packages, not images. A .niso file is a compressed tar+zstd archive containing your binary (or app code), a manifest.toml, and an Ed25519 signature. No base image, no layers, no Dockerfile.
2. systemd is the runtime. When you activate a package, niso generates a systemd unit file with full isolation (namespaces, seccomp, capabilities, cgroups). systemd manages the process lifecycle — restarts, logging, resource limits.
3. Dependencies in, runtime deduplicated. Your code and all its dependencies (node_modules, pip packages, gems) ship inside the package. The language runtime (Node.js, Python, Ruby) is installed once on the host and bind-mounted into a fully isolated rootfs at activation. The process cannot access the host filesystem.