**`piku` is considered STABLE**. It is actively maintained, but "actively" here means the feature set is pretty much done, so it is only updated when new language runtimes are added or reproducible bugs crop up.
It currently requires Python 3.5 or above, but will move to require 3.8+ sometime in early 2023 since that is now the baseline Python 3 version in Ubuntu LTS 20.04 and Debian 11 has already moved on to 3.9.
Since most of its users run it on LTS distributions, there is no rush to introduce disruption. The current plan is to throw up a warning for older runtimes and do regression testing for 3.7, 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10 (replacing the current bracket of tests from 3.5 to 3.8), and make sure we also cover Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 11 and Fedora 37+.
I kept finding myself wanting an Heroku/CloudFoundry-like way to deploy stuff on a few ARM boards and [my Raspberry Pi cluster][raspi-cluster], but since [dokku][dokku] didn't work on ARM at the time and even `docker` can be overkill sometimes, I decided to roll my own.
`piku` is currently able to deploy, manage and independently scale multiple applications per host on both ARM and Intel architectures, and works on any cloud provider (as well as bare metal) that can run Python, `nginx` and `uwsgi`.
* It then looks at a [`Procfile`](docs/DESIGN.md#procfile-format) which is [documented here](docs/DESIGN.md#procfile-format) and starts the relevant workers using [uWSGI][uwsgi] as a generic process manager.
* You can also bake application and `nginx` settings into an [`ENV`](./docs/ENV.md) file which is [documented here](./docs/ENV.md).
You can also deploy a `gh-pages` style static site using a `static` worker type, with the root path as the argument, and run a `release` task to do some processing on the server after `git push`.
* Use [`piku-bootstrap`](https://github.com/piku/piku-bootstrap) to reconfigure a new or existing Ubuntu virtual machine.
* Use `cloud-init` when creating a new virtual machine or barebones automated deployment (check [this repository](https://github.com/piku/cloud-init) for examples).
This shell script simplifies working with multiple `piku` remotes and applications:
* If you `cd` into a project folder that has a `git` remote called `piku` the helper will infer the remote server and app name and use them automatically:
* The `piku` helper also lets you pass settings to the underlying SSH command: `-t` to run interactive commands remotely, and `-A` to proxy authentication credentials in order to do remote `git` pulls.
If you are on a LAN and are accessing `piku` from macOS/iOS/Linux clients, you can try using [`piku/avahi-aliases`](https://github.com/piku/avahi-aliases) to announce different hosts for the same IP address via Avahi/mDNS/Bonjour.
`piku` is intended to work in any POSIX-like environment where you have Python, `nginx`, [`uWSGI`][uwsgi] and SSH: it has been deployed on Linux, FreeBSD, [Cygwin][cygwin] and the [Windows Subsystem for Linux][wsl].
As a baseline, it began its development on an original 256MB Rasbperry Pi Model B, and still runs reliably on it.
But its main use is as a micro-PaaS to run applications on cloud servers with both Intel and ARM CPUs, with Debian and Ubuntu Linux as target platforms.
