Core concepts

The building blocks of TurboStack: clients, groups, hosts, templates and publishing.

Understanding a few core concepts makes the rest of TurboStack easy to follow.

Objects

TurboStack organizes everything into a simple hierarchy.

Concept	What it is
Client	A customer account. It owns hosts and groups, and defines who can see what.
Host	A single server and its configuration - the central object you work with.
Group	A reusable set of settings (such as SSH keys or security rules) applied to many hosts at once.
Template	A pre-built host configuration you can apply to new hosts to save setup time.

A client contains hosts and groups. A host can belong to one or more groups and inherit their settings. Groups and templates help you manage many hosts efficiently.

Hosts and their configuration

A host's configuration describes the desired state of a server. It is structured around:

System users - the operating-system accounts that own files and run applications.
Applications (vhosts) - the individual applications that run under a system user, each with its own domain, application type, PHP version, Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate and more.

You edit this configuration through the GUI editor or directly as YAML in the Source editor. Both describe the same configuration - use whichever you prefer. See Configuring a host.

Publishing and deployments

Saving and publishing are deliberately separate:

Save stores your changes in TurboStack without touching the server.
Publish (also called deploy) saves your changes and applies them to the server.

While a deployment runs, TurboStack shows live progress and logs. See Publishing changes.

Revisions

Every time you save, TurboStack records a revision of the configuration. You can review the history and restore a previous revision if you need to roll back.

Default behavior worth knowing

TurboStack applies sensible, secure defaults so you don't have to configure everything:

TurboShield protection is enabled at the medium level by default.
Database and cache sizes are auto-tuned to the server; only override them with evidence.
Monitoring is enabled and managed by the platform.

Tip

Because most settings have good defaults, you can start with a minimal configuration and only change what you need.

Next steps

Logging in - access the platform.
Deploy your first site - an end-to-end quick start.
Managing hosts - put these concepts to work.
Glossary - definitions of every term used across the docs.