What is deck?

Deck is the web interface for Spinnaker, a platform that helps teams deploy and manage applications across cloud infrastructure. If you use Spinnaker to handle your deployments, Deck is the dashboard you'd open in your browser to see what's happening, trigger deployments, and configure your systems. The application is built with TypeScript and runs in the browser. You start it locally by installing dependencies with yarn, then running a startup command, the interface appears on localhost:9000. Behind the scenes, Deck communicates with Spinnaker's API (called Gate) to fetch information about your deployments and send commands back to the system. You can point it at different Spinnaker servers by setting an API_HOST environment variable, which is useful if you're switching between a local test environment and a production deployment system. The typical user is a DevOps engineer or platform team member who needs a visual way to monitor deployments, manage cloud resources, or configure how applications roll out. Instead of typing commands into a terminal, they use Deck's interface to see the status of deployments in real time, roll back to previous versions if something goes wrong, or manage infrastructure across AWS, Google Cloud, or other platforms that Spinnaker supports. The project is designed to be customizable, teams can build their own modules and plugins that integrate into Deck's interface following its conventions. The README notes this is still evolving, and the maintainers are open to adding new integration points as teams need them. If you want to work on Deck locally, you'll typically run the Spinnaker API gateway (Gate) on your machine as well, which Deck connects to for all its data and operations.