kata

Kata (型), meaning "form," "model," or "pattern."

kata is a tool for deploying and managing applications and is a direct descendant of piku. It is not a replacement for piku, but rather a playground for experimenting with new features and improvements, because piku is meant to be stable and reliable for production use. Renaming it also makes it easier for both to coexist without confusion.

kata is also a set of repetitive patterns and has multiple branches that can be used to experiment with different features and improvements. Some of those features may eventually be merged into piku, while others may remain as experimental branches in kata.

In short, this is not production-ready software, but rather a playground for experimenting with new features and improvements. If you are looking for a stable and reliable tool for deploying and managing applications, please use piku instead.

Right now there are two branches of kata:

• systemd: This branch is designed to work with systemd and caddy and to explore replacing uwsgi with systemd services for application management as well as replacing nginx with caddy for routing and proxying. This tries to maintain the Procfile and ENV file structure of piku.
• compose: This is the "anti-piku" branch, which is designed to work with docker and docker compose and to explore replacing uwsgi with docker containers for application management as well as replacing nginx with caddy for routing and proxying. This branch is an exploration because podman is still (in 2025) very brittle, but fleshing out the idea of using docker containers for application management is a good exercise in figuring out how to later switch to podman and podman quadlets together with systemd. This uses a single YAML file to define the application and its environment, which is a departure from the Procfile and ENV file structure of piku but makes it easier to manage complex configurations.

Requirements

Right now, Debian 13 (Trixie) or later is a requirement because it is likely to be the least common denominator for packaging caddy and other components in Linux distributions.

Additionally, in trixie you should systemctl enable caddy-api to make sure caddy is started with API config persistence and make sure to log in to the kata account using sudo machinectl shell kata@ if you need to do some debugging.

The default caddy configuration should be set to:

{
  debug
  admin localhost:2019
}