Introduction

Helicarrier Cloud is a hosted platform for running your apps, databases, and background services. You connect a GitHub repository or a Docker image, and Helicarrier builds it, runs it, gives it a URL, and keeps it online — with logs, metrics, rollbacks, managed databases, and secrets built in. There is nothing to install and no servers to manage.

If you have used Render, Railway, or Heroku, you will feel at home. The difference is the workspace: everything lives on a visual canvas called the Deck, where your services and the links between them are laid out as nodes you can see and arrange.

The mental model

Three concepts stack together. Understanding them makes the rest of the docs click.

• Project — the workspace for one app stack. A project holds the web app, workers, cron jobs, and databases that belong together, so their deployments, variables, domains, and logs stay in one place.
• Environment — an isolated copy of a project’s services and data. Every project starts with a Production environment; you can add Dev, Staging, or custom ones. Each environment has its own database volumes and variables, so testing in Dev never touches Production data.
• Service — a single running thing: a web app, a static site, a background worker, a cron job, a scale-to-zero function, or a managed database. Services are the nodes on the canvas.

A quick way to picture it: a project contains one or more environments, and each environment contains services that can be linked to one another.

The Deck (your canvas)

When you open a project you land on the Deck — a pannable, zoomable canvas. Each service is a node showing its name, type, and a live status pill (active, building, unhealthy, stopped). Links between services (for example, an app that reads from a database) are drawn as edges. Clicking a node opens a drawer with everything about that service: deployments, logs, a shell, variables, domains, and settings.

You switch environments from a selector on the canvas, and you add services with the + New button.

What you can run

• Web services — anything that listens on a port and serves HTTP, from a Next.js app to a Go API.
• Static sites — built output served over a CDN-style edge.
• Private services — internal-only HTTP, reachable by other services but not the public internet.
• Workers — long-running background processes with no public port.
• Cron jobs — scheduled tasks that run to completion on a schedule.
• Functions — HTTP services that scale to zero when idle and cold-start on the next request.
• Managed databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Redis, MongoDB, ClickHouse, and Qdrant, provisioned and maintained for you.

Where to go next

Head to Sign up & first login to create your account, then Create your first project. When you are ready to deploy, the Quickstart takes you from an empty project to a live URL.