What is CropsCode?

CropsCode is a self-hosted platform for orchestrating agentic development containers across multiple machines. It provides a centralized dashboard to launch, monitor, and interact with AI coding agents running inside containers on your worker machines.

The Farm

Think of CropsCode as a farm where code grows:

• Workers are your fields — machines with Podman installed that run containers
• Containers are your crops — isolated dev environments where AI agents work on tickets
• Planting is launching — paste a ticket URL and a container spins up to work on it
• Harvesting is the output — a draft PR, a passing test suite, a working branch

You provide the machines. CropsCode orchestrates the work.

What It Does

• Launch dev containers from tickets — paste a GitHub issue or Azure DevOps work item (Trello and Monday.com coming soon), and CropsCode spins up a container with an AI agent ready to work on it
• Manage multiple workers — connect any number of machines as worker agents; they phone home to the orchestrator over WebSocket
• Live terminal access — open a web-based terminal to any running container directly from the dashboard
• Monitor resources — see CPU, memory, and disk usage per container in real time
• Build container images — trigger and monitor image builds on your workers from the UI
• Schedule cron workflows — automate recurring tasks: wake up to draft PRs every morning

Architecture

Browser (dashboard)
    │  HTTPS + WebSocket
    ▼
Orchestrator (Next.js + WS server)
    │  WebSocket (outbound phone-home)
    ▼
Worker Agents (one per machine)
    │  child_process
    ▼
Podman Containers (Claude Code, Copilot, Codex)

Workers connect outbound to the orchestrator — they work behind NAT and firewalls with zero port forwarding. All communication happens over WebSocket.

Next Steps

• Quickstart — get running in 5 minutes
• Concepts: Workers — understand self-hosted vs Greenhouse
• CLI Reference — all commands at a glance