App Mesh

One secure, lightweight daemon to run, schedule, and remote-control apps across machines.

🧭 Concepts

App Mesh gives you two capabilities: Hosting and Computing.

🎛 Hosting

Declare an app once. The daemon keeps it running.

Lifecycle — start, stop, and recover the app after a crash or a daemon restart
Scheduling — cron, fixed intervals, start and end dates, daily time windows
Protection — health checks, CPU and memory limits, OS user, tenant isolation
Any app — a native process or a Docker app

Think systemd on every machine. Or Kubernetes desired state, for any app.

🧮 Computing

Submit work to any node. Get the result back.

Command or script — starts a new process, runs once
Task message — reuses a warm app that is already running, no startup cost
Parallel and control — fan out work across nodes; run sync or async, stream output, set timeouts
Workflow — chain many work items into a DAG pipeline and run it natively
AI — send task messages to a hosted LLM agent, or give coding agents a sandbox node to build and run

Think serverless, on your own machines.

⚡ Quick Start

Start the daemon in Docker:

docker run -d --restart=always --name=appmesh --net=host -v appmesh-work:/opt/appmesh/work -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock laoshanxi/appmesh:latest

The appmesh-work volume persists authentication state and application definitions; without it, a recreated container loses the administrator password and every registered app. The container runs as UID 482 — grant that identity access to the Docker socket to manage Docker apps.

Host your first app with the appm CLI — open a shell in the daemon container:

$ docker exec -ti appmesh bash

# Sign in once (non-interactive)
$ /opt/appmesh/script/appmesh-auth.sh print-initial-password | appm logon -u admin@appmesh.local --password-stdin

# List registered applications
$ appm ls
ID  NAME      OWNER   ENABLED  HEALTH  PID  USER     MEMORY  %CPU  RETURN
0   py-task   system  Yes      OK      574  appmesh  32.5Mi  0     -
1   py-exec   system  -        -       -    -        -       -     -
2   identity  system  Yes      OK      344  appmesh  40.5Mi  0     -
3   dexuser   system  Yes      OK      573  appmesh  17.5Mi  0     -
4   workflow  system  Yes      OK      575  appmesh  13.7Mi  0     -

# Register a new application
$ appm add -a myapp -c "python3 -u -c 'import time; [print(i, time.ctime()) or time.sleep(1) for i in range(10)]'"

# View its live output
$ appm ls -a myapp -o
0 Wed Sep 16 10:56:12 2026
1 Wed Sep 16 10:56:13 2026
2 Wed Sep 16 10:56:14 2026

# appm -h for more usage

Send a task message to a running app through the SDK. Mint an admin token first (see the authentication guide):

$ export APPMESH_BEARER_TOKEN=$(/opt/appmesh/script/appmesh-auth.sh print-initial-password \
    | /opt/appmesh/script/appmesh-auth.sh user-token)

import os
from appmesh import AppMeshClient
client = AppMeshClient(bearer_token=os.environ["APPMESH_BEARER_TOKEN"])

result_from_server = "0"
for i in range(10):
    task_data = f"print({result_from_server} + {i}, end='')"
    result_from_server = client.run_task(app_name="py-task", data=task_data)
    print(result_from_server)

For native packages (.deb/.rpm), systemd setup, and cluster initialization, see the Installation Guide and the Dockerfile.

🚀 Core Capabilities

Pillar	Capability	What you get
Hosting	Application management	Full remote CRUD and control — cgroup limits, OS user, environment variables, Docker apps, stdin/stdout — with monitoring of start counts, exit codes, errors, and health checks
Hosting	Scheduling	Long- and short-running apps, periodic jobs, cron expressions, custom timings, and policy-driven start/exit behaviors
Computing	Remote execution	Run commands and scripts on any node; send in-memory tasks to running applications for high-performance computing
Computing	Workflow engine	GitHub-Actions-style YAML pipelines with DAG scheduling, running natively on App Mesh
Platform	Security	OAuth/OIDC bearer authentication (RFC 6750) with Principal-based RBAC and multi-tenant isolation; SSL/TLS on TCP/HTTP/WebSocket; HMAC-PSK internal verification
Platform	Observability	Built-in Prometheus exporter, Grafana datasource, Loki integration, host/app resource metrics
Platform	Extras	File upload/download API, remote shell execution, hot config reload, bash completion

Runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows (x86 and ARM).

🔄 Workflow Pipeline

Define CI/CD pipelines as YAML — similar to GitHub Actions, but running natively on App Mesh with the built-in Workflow Engine:

DAG scheduling — jobs run in dependency order, independent jobs in parallel
4 step types — shell commands, existing Apps, Task API messages, sub-workflows
Error handling — retry with exponential backoff, continue-on-error, finally cleanup blocks
Expressions — ${{ inputs.env }}, ${{ steps.build.stdout }}, success(), failure(), always()
Remote execution — target specific nodes by label or hostname

appm workflow add -f pipeline.yaml        # register
appm workflow run pipeline -e env=prod -f # run and follow output
appm workflow runs pipeline               # view history

🤖 AI & LLM Integration

The Computing pillar makes App Mesh a natural runtime for AI workloads:

Remote sandbox for AI coding assistants — give agents an isolated build-and-run environment instead of your local shell.
MCP server — manage App Mesh from AI clients over Model Context Protocol (Streamable HTTP with OAuth 2.1, RBAC enforced by the daemon).
LLM agent runtime — host Claude-Agent-SDK-based agents as managed App Mesh applications; see the architecture design (SOP).
Remote execution skill for Codex and Claude Code, and MQTT bridge for IoT scenarios.

🧰 Interfaces & SDKs

Interface	Details
CLI	`appm` command reference
REST	REST APIs · OpenAPI spec
Web GUI	app-mesh-ui
SDKs	Python · Golang · Rust · Java · JavaScript · C++

💡 Success Stories

AI & automation

Computing

Operations & observability

Platform & Kubernetes

🆚 Comparison

Feature	App Mesh	systemd	crontab
Schedule accuracy	Seconds	Seconds	Minutes
Language	C++17	C	C
Web GUI	√
Command lines	√	√	√
SDK	√
Cron schedule expression	√		√
Manage docker app	√
Session login	√
Manage stdout/stderr	√	√
Health check	√
Authentication	√
Multi-tenant	√		√

📚 Documentation

Read the Docs — full documentation
Feature Overview — the full capability map behind Hosting and Computing
Installation Guide
Security
Workflow Guide

🔗 Library dependencies

Community & License

Questions and discussions are welcome on Gitter. Licensed under the MIT License.

Release files for appmesh 3.0.6

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for appmesh 3.0.6
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
appmesh-3.0.6-py3-none-any.whl 59.8 kB Sep 25, 2026	Python 3	none	any	Details

Release files / appmesh-3.0.6-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	appmesh-3.0.6-py3-none-any.whl
Size	59.8 kB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`55d12af4a6546c47729028e2284d4b113f5d5649423717a67a7df9e0e01d50e6`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`b593c951402930948de9b3fc53f8d43adbf01eac27a885ddf2ecdc5b94e9462a`
Upload date	Sep 25, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`