Concepts
The central DevStation terms and what each one means.
Topology
Topology is the map of the environment. It is the source of truth for provisioning, install and recreation.
Cluster
A cluster groups nodes from the same provider. The provider supported today is Proxmox.
Node
A node is the physical or base virtual machine that hosts instances.
Virtual Machine
A virtual machine (VM) is described in the topology. It is created from a Size (CPU, RAM and disk) and an Image (the base OS). VMs carry free-form tags for organization.
Image
An Image is the base VM template, such as Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 or Debian 12/13.
Size
A size describes compute resources: CPU, memory and disk.
Station
A station is the unit where services are registered and orchestrated. Think of it as the operational topology of your homelab: a group of services that belong together.
Service
A service is a capability registered inside a station from a blueprint. It stores name, blueprint, vault, inputs, target VMs or host, status and install history.
Blueprint
A blueprint is a declarative YAML recipe for installing and operating a capability. Blueprints can be standalone, with their own VMs, or hosted on another service, such as ArgoCD on k3s.server. A blueprint’s internal role concept (e.g. server, worker) describes install targets within that blueprint only.
Provider
A provider is the platform where infrastructure runs. The provider supported today is Proxmox.
Vault
The vault is the encrypted local store for passwords, SSH keys, tokens, provider credentials and secrets used by services during install.
Provisioning
Provisioning is how DevStation creates and updates VMs. It uses a bundled OpenTofu runtime under the hood, with .tf and .tfvars files as the file format. The tool manages this layer transparently; you do not need to interact with OpenTofu directly.
MCP
The MCP server exposes DevStation to LLM agents. It ships as part of the same single binary and lets external tools read topology, trigger installs and query the vault.