Introducing Orbit

2026-05-12

Today we are
putting Orbit's handbook and this blog on the public internet.

Orbit started as a shell script named ship.sh that three of us were too
embarrassed to show anyone. It rebuilt images, copied files, restarted
services, and worked right up until the night it did not - a half-finished
deploy at 11pm, one service on the new build, two on the old, and no record
of what ship.sh had actually done before it died.

The tool we wanted after that night had three properties:

1. Show the change before making it. A deploy should start as a plan a
   human can read.
2. Make the same change everywhere. Laptop and CI should run the same
   code path, not a script and its "temporary" fork.
3. Make undo trivial. If rolling back takes longer than deciding to,
   nobody rolls back - they patch forward at midnight instead.

Orbit is those three properties as a single binary. Describe your service in
one file, and orbit deploy plans, diffs, applies,
verifies, and keeps every release addressable for
instant rollback.

Start with the five-minute quickstart. The
roadmap says where this goes next - previews per branch are
closest.

Orbit is a fictional product; this site is a live demo of Mojo Sites - the
handbook and this blog are docit books mounted on a static site.