FreeBSD The Power to Serve

Container orchestration: Overlord, Director and AppJail

Contact: Jesús Daniel Colmenares Oviedo <DtxdF@disroot.org>

AppJail is an open-source BSD-3 licensed framework entirely written in POSIX shell and C to create isolated, portable and easy to deploy environments using FreeBSD jails that behaves like an application.

Director is a tool for running multi-jail environments on AppJail using a simple YAML specification. A Director file is used to define how one or more jails that make up your application are configured. Once you have a Director file, you can create and start your application with a single command: appjail-director up.

Overlord is a fast, distributed orchestrator for FreeBSD jails oriented to GitOps. You define a file with the service intended to run on your cluster and deployment takes seconds to minutes. This orchestration tool uses AppJail, Director and can even create VMs with vm-bhyve, but as its philosophy is "deploy using code" you can create a single file once and deploy many times. Through a tree chaining system Overlord deploys jails on connected systems sharing their resources almost infinitely. See the wiki for articles that use Overlord.


Last modified on: May 20, 2025 by Lorenzo Salvadore