Several Apps on One VPS

Host more than one application on the same server, isolated from each other

A 2 vCPU VPS runs several small Symfony applications without noticing. FrankenDeploy is built for it: every app gets its own directory, database, domain, Caddy configuration and Docker network, and shares nothing but the machine and the reverse proxy.

Deploying a second app

Nothing special. From the second project’s directory:

frankendeploy init --domain other-app.com
openssl rand -hex 32 | frankendeploy env set prod APP_SECRET --from-stdin
frankendeploy deploy prod

prod is the same server entry; the app name comes from frankendeploy.yaml (name:) and must be unique on the server. Caddy learns the new domain at the first deploy and requests its certificate. The first app is not restarted, not even reloaded: Caddy picks up the new configuration with a hot reload.

What each app gets

Two apps cannot talk to each other over the network, even with the right credentials: they are not on the same Docker network. If you want two of your apps to communicate, do it over HTTPS through their public domains, like any external client would.

Seeing what runs

frankendeploy app list prod

Applications on prod:

  my-app
    Status:  Up 2 hours (healthy)
    Release: 20260902-131358

  other-app
    Status:  Up 5 minutes (healthy)
    Release: 20260902-140102

frankendeploy server status prod adds CPU and memory per container, and the machine’s own load, memory and disk.

Commands are per project

deploy, rollback, logs, exec, shell, env, doctor act on the application of the frankendeploy.yaml in the current directory. Run them from the right project; the server argument is the same.

app commands take the app name explicitly and work from anywhere:

frankendeploy app status prod other-app
frankendeploy app remove prod other-app --force              # containers, network, images, directory, database volume
frankendeploy app remove prod other-app --force --keep-data  # same, but the database volume stays

Resources

Every app container can be capped, per app, in its frankendeploy.yaml:

deploy:
  memory_limit: 512m
  cpu_limit: "1"

Without limits, apps share the machine on a first-come basis, and a runaway app can starve the others. With a few apps on a small VPS, a memory limit per app is the one setting worth adding. Log rotation is always on, so logs cannot fill the disk; keep_releases bounds the images and backups of each app.

Domains and subdomains

Each app has one deploy.domain. api.my-app.com and my-app.com are two apps if they are two Symfony projects, or one app with routing inside Symfony if they are the same project (Caddy sends everything for the domain to the container). A redirect from www.my-app.com is not generated; add a .caddy file for it in /opt/frankendeploy/caddy/apps/ by hand (docker exec caddy caddy reload --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile after).

Staging next to production

Same server, two entries in the global config? No: a server entry is a machine, and an app name must be unique per machine. Two options:

• Two machines: frankendeploy server add staging ..., then frankendeploy deploy staging. The cleanest, and what a small team usually does.
• One machine, two names: a second frankendeploy.yaml is not needed; use frankendeploy init --name my-app-staging --domain staging.my-app.com --force in a copy of the project, or maintain two config files and pass --config frankendeploy.staging.yaml. Both apps then live side by side, isolated like any two apps.