dstack

How does it work?

Installation

Before using dstack through CLI or API, set up a dstack server. If you already have a running dstack server, you only need to set up the CLI.

Set up the server

Configure backends

To orchestrate compute across GPU clouds or Kubernetes clusters, you need to configure backends.

Backends can be set up in ~/.dstack/server/config.yml or through the project settings page in the UI.

For more details, see Backends.

When using dstack with on-prem servers, backend configuration isn’t required. Simply create SSH fleets once the server is up.

Start the server

You can install the server on Linux, macOS, and Windows (via WSL 2). It requires Git and OpenSSH.

uv

$ uv tool install "dstack[all]" -U

pip

$ pip install "dstack[all]" -U

Once it's installed, go ahead and start the server.

$ dstack server
Applying ~/.dstack/server/config.yml...

The admin token is "bbae0f28-d3dd-4820-bf61-8f4bb40815da"
The server is running at http://127.0.0.1:3000/

For more details on server configuration options, see the Server deployment guide.

Set up the CLI

Once the server is up, you can access it via the dstack CLI.

The CLI can be installed on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It requires Git and OpenSSH.

uv

$ uv tool install dstack -U

pip

$ pip install dstack -U

To point the CLI to the dstack server, configure it with the server address, user token, and project name:

$ dstack project add \
    --name main \
    --url http://127.0.0.1:3000 \
    --token bbae0f28-d3dd-4820-bf61-8f4bb40815da
    
Configuration is updated at ~/.dstack/config.yml

Define configurations

dstack supports the following configurations:

• Fleets — for managing cloud and on-prem clusters
• Dev environments — for interactive development using a desktop IDE
• Tasks — for scheduling jobs (incl. distributed jobs) or running web apps
• Services — for deployment of models and web apps (with auto-scaling and authorization)
• Volumes — for managing persisted volumes

Configuration can be defined as YAML files within your repo.

Apply configurations

Apply the configuration either via the dstack apply CLI command or through a programmatic API.

dstack automatically manages provisioning, job queuing, auto-scaling, networking, volumes, run failures, out-of-capacity errors, port-forwarding, and more — across clouds and on-prem clusters.

Useful links

For additional information, see the following links:

• Docs
• Examples
• Discord

Contributing

You're very welcome to contribute to dstack. Learn more about how to contribute to the project at CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

Mozilla Public License 2.0