Introduction

ork is an environment orchestration tool for short-lived infrastructure and application sandboxes.

You define an environment in ork.yaml. ork applies each component in dependency order, captures component outputs, persists operational state, and can later destroy the environment from that state.

The same manifest can be started more than once with different environment IDs. That makes it useful for booting multiple variants of the same stack: one per developer, pull request, demo, test run, or configuration experiment.

ork up -e alice-api-test
ork up -e bob-compose-demo
ork up -e pr-184

Each environment gets its own state bundle and ork-managed work directories, so teams can share the shape of an environment without sharing one live instance.

Good Fits

• Preview environments for pull requests
• Per-developer variants of the same app stack
• Local or CI smoke environments
• Integration test sandboxes
• Temporary demos
• Multi-tool workflows that combine scripts, Compose, Terraform, or CloudFormation

Current Shape

ork is alpha software. The current implementation focuses on making the lifecycle reliable before broadening the ecosystem.

The project currently supports:

• local and SSH runners
• local and S3 state backends
• script, Docker Compose, Terraform, and CloudFormation adapters
• lifecycle hooks
• component outputs
• state inspection
• state-driven teardown