Stacks
A stack groups related applications that make up a single system — a web frontend, an API, a worker, a cache — so you can manage them together, compose-style, within a workspace.
What a stack is
Many real systems are more than one process. A typical app might be a web service plus a background worker, talking to a database and a cache. A stack lets you treat those related applications as one logical group instead of a loose collection of separate apps. It's the Miabi equivalent of a Compose file: the pieces are defined together and belong together.
Each application in a stack is still a full Miabi application — it has its own releases, environment, scaling, and logs. The stack is the grouping that ties them together.
Names
A stack has two names, and only one of them can change:
- Name — the permanent handle, a lowercase slug unique within the workspace. It is the stack's identity: the Docker Compose project name stamped onto every member container's labels, the per-stack Docker network, and the key a GitOps bundle matches the stack by are all derived from it when the stack is created. It cannot be changed — renaming would detach the stack from its own resources and make an apply create a duplicate. To use a different name, create a new stack and move the apps across.
- Display name — the free-text label shown in the console. Change it whenever you like.
When to use a stack
Use a stack when several apps:
- Belong to the same system — they're deployed, versioned, and reasoned about together.
- Share configuration — they reference the same secrets and database credentials.
- Depend on each other — a worker and the web app it supports, for example.
If an application is genuinely standalone, it doesn't need a stack — create it on its own.
| Scenario | Stack? |
|---|---|
| Web + API + worker for one product | Yes — group them |
| A self-contained marketing site | No — standalone app |
| Two unrelated apps that happen to share a server | No — keep separate |
Stacks pair naturally with Environments: promote a whole system from dev to staging to production as a unit, rather than moving each app one at a time.
A stack is a grouping within a single workspace. To isolate entirely separate projects or teams, use separate workspaces instead.