Adding a Server

DeployOS is agentless: it never installs a persistent daemon on your VPS. Every action — deploying, checking logs, restarting a container — happens over a normal SSH connection at the moment you trigger it, then disconnects. Nothing is running on your server between actions except the containers you actually deployed.

What you need

• A VPS running Ubuntu (or another Docker-capable Linux distro) that you can reach over SSH.
• Root or sudo access.
• Either a password or an SSH private key.

A $5/month box is genuinely enough to start.

Connect it

1. Go to Servers → Add Server.
2. Enter the host (IP or hostname), SSH port (default 22), username (usually root), and either a password or a private key.
3. Choose a reverse proxy: Traefik (default) or Caddy. This is what terminates HTTPS and routes incoming traffic to the right app — see Domains & SSL for the difference.
4. Click Test connection. DeployOS opens a real SSH session, checks it can run commands, and only then lets you save.

Enlarge

Your credentials are stored in your OS's native keychain (macOS Keychain / Windows Credential Manager) — never in a plaintext config file, never uploaded anywhere.

Already have apps running on this box?

If the server isn't blank — it already runs your own Docker Compose stacks, or a previous manual deployment — don't start from scratch. Save the server first, then run a Scan to see what's already there and adopt it non-destructively. See Adopting an Existing Server.

Next step

A freshly added server isn't ready to deploy to yet — it needs Docker, a firewall, and the reverse proxy installed. That's Bootstrapping a Server, the next step for a blank VPS.