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Crude Functions Documentation

Crude Functions is a minimal, self-hosted serverless function platform that runs in a single Docker container. Write TypeScript functions, deploy them as HTTP endpoints, manage everything through a web UI or API. That’s it.

Philosophy: Simple, pragmatic, and designed for internal use. No complex deployment pipelines, no sandboxing theater, no scaling nonsense. You want to run some functions on your network? Done.

Target use case: Internal network services with low-to-moderate traffic. Think internal APIs, webhooks, automation scripts, or small tools for your team.

You should use Crude Functions if you:

  • Want a simple way to deploy and manage serverless-style functions internally
  • Trust the code you’re running (no sandboxing - this is for internal use)
  • Don’t need massive scale or complex orchestration
  • Want to avoid cloud vendor lock-in for internal tooling
  • Value simplicity over enterprise features

You should NOT use this if you:

  • Need to run untrusted code (no sandbox)
  • Expect high traffic
  • Want a production-ready public API platform
  • Need multi-tenancy or advanced isolation
  • Minimal footprint: Single Deno process, ~25MB RAM idle
  • Zero-downtime deploys: Hot-reload functions without restarting the server
  • Simple function authoring: Register a function by specifying handler file location
  • No build step: Deno runs TypeScript directly
  • API-based deployment: Programmatically add/update functions via HTTP
  • Secrets management with multiple scopes to keep them out of your code.
  • Web UI: Browser-based management interface
  • API key authentication: Flexible key-based access control
  • Encryption at rest for API keys and secrets

Check out our Getting Started to learn how to install and use Crude Functions.