Is this for you?

outpost is deliberately opinionated. It’s a great fit if your setup matches the grain below — and a poor fit if it doesn’t. Better to know now.

outpost is for you if…

• You have (or can rent) a remote Linux host — a VPS, a home server, anything with Docker. outpost runs your dev environments there, not on your laptop.
• You’re happy working in the terminal: Helix/Vim, tmux, lazygit, and CLI AI agents (Claude Code, Codex, opencode) — all running inside the container.
• You want one isolated container per project, with that project’s services (Postgres, Redis, …) alongside, and the ability to blow it away and rebuild without losing your work.
• You like tools you can read. outpost is one bash script; every action is a plain docker command.
• You want the choice of cheap ARM hosting. Every baked-in tool ships for both arm64 and amd64, so the base image builds and runs the same on an ARM VPS as on x86 — pick the host by price, not by architecture.

What it assumes

Piece	Why	Required?
A remote Linux host with Docker	Where containers run	Yes
SSH access (Tailscale recommended)	You drive everything over SSH	Yes
Host user with uid 1000	So the container’s ubuntu user can read your forwarded agent	Recommended
An SSH agent with forwarding	Git inside the box signs/authenticates without the key entering it	For git
macOS + Secretive	Touch-ID-gated keys in the Secure Enclave	Optional (any agent works)
A Cloudflare account + domain	Public per-project tunnels	Optional

The macOS/Secretive bits make the git-signing story especially nice, but any forwarded ssh-agent works — outpost itself runs entirely on the Linux host.

uid 1000 caveat. The container’s ubuntu user is uid 1000, and the forwarded agent socket is mode 0600, so the host login user should also be uid 1000 to read it (the first user created on Ubuntu is). If your host user isn’t uid 1000, outpost warns and git inside the box may fail to reach the agent. The fix is to run outpost as a uid-1000 user — either make one the login user, or sudo -u <uid-1000-user> -i. Do not loosen the socket mode; that would expose your forwarded agent to other users on the host. See Troubleshooting.

It’s probably not for you if…

• You want a local, GUI-IDE devcontainer experience (use VS Code Dev Containers).
• You can’t or won’t run a remote host.
• You need Windows containers, or a Kubernetes-style multi-node scheduler.

The cost

A small always-on VPS (a few dollars a month) is enough for several projects. You SSH in, you work, you disconnect — tmux keeps your sessions (and agents) alive in between.

Sound right? → Installation