What is nanocl?

Nanocl is an open-source tool for running containers and virtual machines on your own hardware. It gives you a command-line interface (nanocl) and a background daemon (nanocld) that works with Docker or Podman, keeping the desired state in a CockroachDB database (nstore). You describe your workloads — groups of containers called Cargoes, plus VMs, scheduled jobs, secrets, and network rules — in declarative Statefiles written as YAML, TOML, or JSON, then apply them with a single command. Built-in controllers handle HTTP/TCP routing with TLS (via NGINX) and service DNS (via dnsmasq). The system is designed mainly for single-node use and does not yet provide automatic multi-node scheduling or high availability. You can install it with a one-line script, prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows, a Debian package, or by compiling from source with Cargo. The code is dual-licensed under MIT OR Apache-2.0 and is actively maintained by the Next Hat organization.

Should you self-host nanocl?

nanocl scores 52/100 on selfhost.directory (how scoring works) and ranks #6 of 11 in Container Orchestration. It has 1 004 GitHub stars.

It shipped 8 stable releases in the past year. The latest, nanocl-0.18.1, came out on 26 September 2026.

Setup is advanced: plan for several services and some ongoing maintenance. It is Apache-2.0-licensed and written mostly in Rust.

Its closest alternative on selfhost.directory is uncloud (65/100, 5 584 stars). It scores higher overall, so compare the two before you pick. See nanocl vs uncloud side by side.