InstaServer

A free, open-source, self-hosted alternative to InstaPods, Vercel, and other centralized deploy platforms.

InstaServer is an MCP server that gives an AI agent (Claude Code, or any MCP client) the same kind of tools InstaPods offers — deploy_pod, exec_command, get_logs, read_file/write_file, and so on — except every "pod" is a real Docker container running on your own machine, with a public HTTPS URL from a free Cloudflare quick tunnel. No account, no signup, no payment method, no per-deploy billing, no platform-imposed rate limit.

Why this exists

Centralized platforms (Vercel, Netlify, InstaPods, etc.) are convenient until their free/hobby tier throttles you — a burst of a dozen pushes in an hour can trip a build-rate limit and silently freeze your production deploys for days, with no obvious signal that it happened. InstaServer trades platform convenience for owning the whole stack: your machine, your Docker engine, your uptime, no ceiling.

Trade-off, stated plainly: your machine has to be on for the pod to be reachable, and the free Cloudflare quick tunnel is explicitly best-effort (Cloudflare's own words: "no uptime guarantee"). This is the right tool for local development, demos, side projects, and internal tools — not a drop-in replacement for production hosting of a business-critical site with an SLA.

Related MCP server: localmcpcoder

Requirements

• Node.js 20+

• colima (or Docker Desktop) — provides the Docker engine

• cloudflared — provides free quick tunnels

brew install colima docker cloudflared
colima start --cpu 2 --memory 4 --disk 20

Install

git clone <this repo> instaserver
cd instaserver
npm install
npm run build

Register it as an MCP server

With the Claude Code CLI:

claude mcp add instaserver -- node /absolute/path/to/instaserver/dist/index.js

Or add it manually to your MCP client's config (e.g. ~/.claude.json under mcpServers, or a project's .mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "instaserver": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/instaserver/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

Presets

• static — nginx:alpine, serves the uploaded files as-is. Entry: index.html.

• nodejs — node:20-alpine, runs npm install if package.json is present, then node <entry>. Entry: server.js / index.js / app.js. PORT=8080 is set for you.

• python — python:3.12-alpine, runs pip install -r requirements.txt if present, then python <entry>. Entry: main.py / app.py / server.py. PORT=8080 is set for you.

How it works

Each pod is a named Docker volume (persistent app storage) + a named container built from the preset's image, with the volume mounted at the app root and the container's port published to a free host port. deploy_pod stages your files locally, docker cps them into the container, and boots it with sh -c "<install> && exec <start>". A cloudflared quick tunnel is opened against the host port to get a public https://*.trycloudflare.com URL — reachability is verified before the URL is handed back, retrying with a fresh hostname up to 3 times if Cloudflare's registration doesn't come up cleanly (this happens occasionally; it's a known characteristic of the free tier, not a bug).

Pod state lives in ~/.instapod-free/state.json so the MCP server can restart without losing track of what's running.

Limitations (read before relying on this)

• Your machine needs to be on and awake for pods to be reachable.

• Free Cloudflare quick tunnels are best-effort — no SLA, hostnames can occasionally need a retry.

• No built-in TLS cert management beyond what the tunnel provides, no custom domains, no multi-region.

• Presets are minimal by design (three runtimes). Extending src/presets.ts is straightforward if you need another.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.