What is Orbit?

Orbit is zero-downtime deployment automation for Magento 2. Atomic Capistrano-style releases, instant symlink swaps, health-check auto-rollback. Maintenance mode only flips when a database migration actually requires it — code-only deploys stay 200 the whole way through.

How it's wired

Two pieces:

1. A tiny Rust agent (orbit-agent, ~10 MB single binary) runs on your Magento host. It polls the Orbit control plane for tasks and executes git clone, composer install, bin/magento ..., and the symlink swap locally.
2. The cloud control plane at orbit.byte8.io stores environments, schedules deploys, holds the deployment history, and shows you what's happening in real time.

The agent only ever makes outbound HTTPS calls — no inbound ports to expose, no webhooks to configure, no public agent endpoint.

What you get over a hand-rolled deploy script

• Atomic releases. New releases land in releases/{TIMESTAMP}/ next to the live one. The swap is a single ln -sfn. Customers never see a half-built site.
• Conditional maintenance mode. bin/magento setup:db:status runs first. No migrations → no 503. Migrations present → mode flips for the upgrade only, not the whole build.
• Automatic rollback. After the swap, the agent hits your health-check URL. Non-2xx → symlink reverts, cache flushes, maintenance disables. The site is back up before the on-call gets paged.
• Traffic hold (opt-in, v0.10.0). During a migration window, checkout/cart requests are parked in RAM and replayed against the new release; everyone else sees a live waiting page with a countdown — instead of the maintenance 503. Bounded (default 25s budget) and fail-open by construction. (traffic hold)
• Migration Intelligence (v0.10.0). Before setup:upgrade runs, Orbit diffs your declarative schema, classifies each change against MySQL 8's online-DDL behaviour, sizes it with your real table row counts, and predicts how long the migration will block — in the deploy log, before the window opens. (migration intelligence)
• Release safety steps (v0.11.0). Service preflight TCP-probes DB/Redis/RabbitMQ from the release's env.php before anything disruptive; an optional mysqldump runs before migration windows; configured URLs are warmed after the health check passes. (release safety)
• Module-drift detection. Bumped a module's setup_version without a db_schema.xml change? Orbit still notices and runs setup:upgrade so registration state matches the deployed code. (drift detection)
• Maintenance allowlist. Whitelist your office IP so you can validate the new release before flipping traffic back. (allowlist IPs)
• Centrally upgraded. orbit-agent self-upgrade pulls the latest stable build from GitHub. No SSH-and-sudo apt upgrade per host.

Where to start

You want to...	Go to
Get an environment live in under 30 min	Quick start
Install the agent on a server you already own	Install the agent
Understand the deployment shape	Zero-downtime overview
Keep checkout alive through DB migrations	Traffic hold
Wire CI/CD against the GraphQL API	Personal Access Tokens
Migrate an existing single-directory install	orbit-agent init
Diagnose a stuck deploy	Troubleshooting

Where Orbit isn't a fit (yet)

• Long, blocking migrations still need planning. Traffic hold makes short migration windows invisible to snippet-wired traffic, and Migration Intelligence tells you the duration in advance — but a genuinely multi-minute COPY-class migration exceeds any honest hold budget and deserves a scheduled window (or an expand/contract restructure). Orbit tells you which case you're in before the window opens; it doesn't pretend the slow case away.
• One host per deploy. A single deploy targets one host. Running several environments on one host is supported (--name — see Multiple environments); what's not shipped is multi-host fan-out — one deploy updating N agents across N hosts in parallel (a horizontally-scaled app tier). That's on the roadmap.
• Magento 2 only. Magento 1 is not a target. Other PHP stacks (Symfony, Laravel) might work with the agent but aren't tested.

Pricing

See byte8.io/products/orbit. One agent token works on one environment; multi-environment plans cover multiple hosts under one dashboard.