What is cellp

cellp is a private Workers platform control plane. It versions your Worker and its data on every deploy, serves a preview URL, assigns the first ready version to production automatically, and uses promote for later production cutovers.

It is not a Cloudflare account and not self-hosted Cloudflare. It is not Vercel and not a Git host. You keep GitHub (or GitLab, or Forgejo), your CI, and your load balancer. cellp sits in the middle: receive an artifact, run an isolated celld process, route traffic.

The product

A project is an app. A version is one deploy of that app.

You get	What that means
Preview URL	preview_url — live Worker for that deploy (HTTP Host on gateway)
Production URL	prod_url — current prod_version_id (first ready on a new project, or last promote; prod Host unchanged on promote)
Data that matches the code	Child versions branch D1, KV, R2, and Queues from a parent. Writes stay in the preview.
Dashboard	Projects, versions, storage browsers, env vars — talking only to the REST API
Self-host	One-line install then cellp dev on a laptop (no Docker). Docker Compose + RustFS for a production-shaped VM.

What you write

A Cloudflare-style Worker:

export default {
  async fetch(request, env) {
    const row = await env.DB.prepare('select count(*) as n from products').first()
    return Response.json(row)
  },
}

Bindings come from wrangler.jsonc inside the bundle (d1_databases, kv_namespaces, r2_buckets, queues, workflows, triggers.crons). The runtime is celld — a Rust Workers engine shipped with cellp (git submodule in the repository). The cellp project maintains and extends celld for private deployment: per-version buckets, d1 branch, KV/R2/Queue branch, and operator CLIs that cellpd invokes. cellp does not re-implement the isolate; it orchestrates one celld process per ready version.

What cellp is not

These are product decisions, not missing tickets:

Not in scope	Who owns it
User accounts, orgs, SSO, RBAC	Your IdP / outer layer, or two shared tokens
Git hosting, webhooks, PR bots	GitHub / GitLab / Forgejo + CI
DNS, CDN, TLS, WAF, DDoS	Your load balancer / Nginx / gateway
Global anycast PoPs	Not a CDN. Distributed control plane is a later scale-out, not edge
Next.js / Node serverless	Use Vercel or a Node host. cellp runs Workers, not Node

Read the full comparison in Compare and the honest list in Limits.

The stack (operator view)

Piece	Role
cellpd	API, orchestrator, gateway, SQLite registry
celld	Workers + D1 + KV + R2 + Queue + Workflow runtime (one process per ready version)
offshoot	Copy-on-write data fork between parent and child versions (concept)
RustFS	Private S3 for artifacts, offshoot, and per-version blobs
Dashboard (web/)	Vite SPA. Never talks to celld directly

You already have Git and CI. cellp does not replace them.

Status

cellp v1 is a working platform: CD loop, preview/prod routing, promote, D1 import/branch, KV/R2/Queue branch, archive/wake, Dashboard, Docker image on GHCR.

It is built to be run by you. There is no hosted cellp cloud.

Next: Why cellp · How it works · Quick start