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Expect rough edges. If something is missing or hard to follow, tell us on Discord or by mail at hallo@knecht.works.

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Introduction

What Knecht is and how it fits into your workflow.

What Is Knecht?

Knecht is a self-hosted dashboard that runs workflows on your projects. A workflow boots the project in an isolated environment on your server and works through a list of steps, for example a Composer update, the test suite, a link check, or an AI agent that looks into a bug report. The result comes back as a pull request, a preview URL, or a comment in the ticket that started it.

It is aimed at agencies and freelancers that maintain many projects at once. The work it takes over is the recurring kind, security and dependency updates, link checks, and the first look at a bug report, where most of the effort goes into booting the right project.

What Knecht Is Not

Not an AI tool. The AI action is one action among others. A workflow that updates packages, runs the tests, and opens a pull request needs no AI at all.
Not a hosting platform. Previews exist for review, sit behind the login, and go away with the session. Production stays where it is.
Not a cloud service. You need your own Linux server or a Mac, and you install and update Knecht yourself. During the beta we host a limited number of instances, see Beta Testers.
Not zero-effort. A project has to be bootable by a machine. Projects with a DDEV config qualify directly. For PHP and Node projects without one, Knecht detects the stack and generates the config.

Features

Feature	Explanation
Deterministic steps	Boot the project, run shell commands or your own JavaScript, call URLs, check links, create branches, commits, and pull requests, with conditions and loops.
AI agent	Hands the booted project to an agent that reads code, changes files, and runs commands until the task is done. Keeps a memory per project.
Triggers	GitHub events, changes in an issue tracker, a schedule, or a click in the dashboard. One workflow can serve several projects.
Mentions	`@knecht-works <instruction>` in a GitHub issue or pull request, or a mention of the Knecht account in an issue tracker, continues the work where the last run stopped.
Previews	Every session gets a URL under your domain with a real database behind it, gated by the Knecht login.
Terminal and IDE	Open a shell, an SSH command, or VS Code in the running environment from the run page.
Retry	A failed run resumes from the step where it stopped, earlier outputs are kept.
Environment lifecycle	Idle environments are stopped, archived, and removed on schedules you set.
Team access	Members sign in with GitHub. An allowlist decides who gets in.
Workflows as code	Export and import workflows as YAML.
Updates	One install script, updates from the dashboard, optional auto-update.

Getting Started

Concepts explains how a run works and what projects, sessions, and previews are. Installation gets the instance up, Setup creates the GitHub App and invites the team, and Projects adds the first project. The pages under Integrations describe what each integration can do, starting with GitHub.

Community

Knecht is young and built in the open, and the people who run it shape where it goes. If you try it, we would like to hear how it went. What worked, what broke, which workflow you wish existed, which stack refused to boot. Every report helps, and the small ones are often the most useful.

Discord. The Knecht Discord is where questions get answered and ideas get discussed. Say hello, show what you built, or ask when something is unclear.
GitHub. Bugs and feature requests are welcome as issues on GitHub. The code is public.
Email. For anything else, write to hallo@knecht.works. A real person reads it.

What changes as a result shows up on the Updates page.

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Concepts

The pieces you meet in the dashboard and how they fit together.