What is Sablier used for?

Sablier: Starts containers and workloads on demand and stops them after inactivity, working with reverse proxies such as Traefik, Caddy, Nginx, and Envoy. It is a good fit for saving resources on a Raspberry Pi homelab and scaling idle QA environments to zero.

Is Sablier open source?

Yes. Sablier is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at sablierapp/sablier and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Sablier is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Sablier?

Yes. Sablier can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What are some alternatives to Sablier?

Similar open-source tools in the Infrastructure & Containers category include Portainer, Umbrel and Runtipi. SaaS products in the same category include Docker Desktop, Google Kubernetes Engine and OrbStack.

Is Sablier actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Sablier was on 29 September 2026, and the latest release is v1.18.0, published on 2 September 2026. The project has 3k stars on GitHub.

Sablier: open-source infrastructure & containers

About Sablier

Sablier is free and open-source software that wakes workloads when requests arrive and shuts them down after a period of inactivity. It plugs into reverse proxies, intercepts incoming requests, starts the sleeping workload, and shows a waiting page until the service is ready. It is released under the AGPL-3.0 license and written in Go.

It supports Docker, Docker Swarm, Podman, Kubernetes, and Proxmox LXC. Additional options include a customizable waiting page with themes, webhook notifications when instances start or stop, Prometheus metrics, OpenTelemetry tracing, stop or pause strategies, a scale mode that throttles CPU and memory instead of stopping, and anti-affinity to avoid contention between GPU or RAM-heavy groups.

It can be installed as a Docker image, a binary, a Helm chart, or built from source. Sablier fits small machines such as a Raspberry Pi, QA environments used once a week, and cloud setups where idle workloads can be scaled to zero to cut costs. The audience is homelab users and DevOps engineers.

Key features

On-demand start and automatic stop of workloads
Plugins for Traefik, Caddy, Nginx, and Envoy
Docker, Swarm, Podman, Kubernetes, and Proxmox LXC
Customizable waiting page with themes
Webhooks, Prometheus metrics, and OpenTelemetry tracing
Scale mode to throttle idle workloads

Good fit for

→Saving resources on a Raspberry Pi homelab
→Scaling idle QA environments to zero

Built with: Go; Docker; Kubernetes
Tags: docker; kubernetes; reverse-proxy; traefik; autoscaling; homelab; cost-saving; self-hosted

Sablier: questions and answers

What is Sablier used for?: Sablier: Starts containers and workloads on demand and stops them after inactivity, working with reverse proxies such as Traefik, Caddy, Nginx, and Envoy. It is a good fit for saving resources on a Raspberry Pi homelab and scaling idle QA environments to zero.
Is Sablier open source?: Yes. Sablier is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at sablierapp/sablier and is written mainly in Go.
Is Sablier free?: Yes. Sablier is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Sablier?: Yes. Sablier can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What are some alternatives to Sablier?: Similar open-source tools in the Infrastructure & Containers category include Portainer, Umbrel and Runtipi. SaaS products in the same category include Docker Desktop, Google Kubernetes Engine and OrbStack.
Is Sablier actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Sablier was on 29 September 2026, and the latest release is v1.18.0, published on 2 September 2026. The project has 3k stars on GitHub.