After six months of development, 22 beta releases, and two release candidates, incus-compose has reached its 1.0 milestone. The tool brings Docker Compose-style orchestration to Incus, the community fork of Canonical's LXD, letting users point a standard compose.yaml at an Incus host and run incus-compose up to deploy multi-container stacks. Built as portable Go binaries, incus-compose works from Windows and macOS desktops without Docker Desktop, WSL, or a local Linux VM, driving a remote Incus server over HTTPS to manage OCI containers, LXC system containers, and full virtual machines from a single workflow.
The 1.0 release covers most of the Docker Compose command surface: up, down, start, stop, restart, logs, exec, build, and pull all work as expected. Compose file parsing is handled by the upstream compose-go library, with automatic override files (compose.incus.yaml) and custom x-incus extensions that expose Incus-native features like USB and GPU device passthrough. Networking supports bridge networks with static IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and automatic DHCP ranges. Storage volumes handle UID/GID shifting natively, and health checks with depends_on: service_healthy are managed through a dedicated ic-healthd sidecar. A handful of commands (run, pause/unpause, port) remain unimplemented, though the project's CLI reference documents workarounds for each.
Incus itself has become the primary community-governed alternative to LXD since the project forked in late 2023 under the stewardship of Stéphane Graber, LXD's original creator. Where Docker focuses exclusively on OCI application containers, Incus offers a unified API for OCI containers, full system containers, and VMs, making it a compelling platform for self-hosters who want to run mixed workloads on a single machine. The gap in the ecosystem has always been orchestration tooling: deploying a multi-service stack on Incus meant writing shell scripts or managing instances by hand. Incus-compose fills that gap directly, and the project now lives under the official lxc GitHub organization.
The lead developer reports running incus-compose in production with stacks including Immich, Gitea, Caddy, and Wiki.js. Arch Linux users can install via AUR packages (incus-compose-bin or incus-compose-git), and everyone else can grab the binary with a one-line curl install or use the built-in incus-compose self-update command from any recent beta. Full documentation, working examples including a complete Immich deployment, and the project roadmap are available at docs.incus-compose.org.
