Homelab Process Orchestration
Homelab folks have a great Kubernetes-alternatives ladder: K3s, MicroK8s, k0s, Nomad, Docker Swarm, Portainer. They're all real options. My case for going one step lighter still.
Celistra is for the homelab whose workload is mostly:
- A long-running scraper
- Some training runs
- An AI agent doing background research
- Some Playwright runs
- The occasional batch job
None of those needs pod scheduling. They need supervision: spawn, watch, restart on crash, sandbox per agent, audit log.
Setup
- Install
celistradon each box (Pi, NUC, GPU rig, NAS-with-shell, etc.) - Pair each one
- Use the dashboard or
celistrad ctlCLI
The daemon ARM64 binary is small enough for a Pi 4 or Pi 5. The Linux x86_64 build runs fine on any NAS that gives you SSH.
What this replaces in a typical homelab
| Old | Celistra |
|---|---|
| SSH into each box, screen / tmux per service | One dashboard, all boxes, one row per process |
| systemd unit files for every script | Spawn from dashboard, mark autoRestart |
| "Did the scraper finish?" | 30-day SQLite history per host |
| Permission prompts blocking forever | Phone push for approval |
What it doesn't replace
Plex / Jellyfin / Vaultwarden / Home Assistant — those are long-lived services that should run under systemd / Docker. Celistra is for the spawned, supervised, often-interactive processes that systemd doesn't fit.
FAQ
Does it work on Raspberry Pi 4?
Yes — ARM64 binary, ~10MB. PTY support is native.
Can I run it without internet?
Pairing requires internet (Firebase Auth). After pairing, LAN-only operation works fine.