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Hobbyist

Your first project

works

This assumes the installer has run.

Start the daemon

Section titled “Start the daemon”
Terminal window
hobby daemon

The daemon owns all state and all lifecycle. Nothing else in the system starts or stops a container. It listens on a unix socket for the CLI and MCP, and on loopback TCP for Studio, and it stays in the foreground, so give it its own terminal or put it behind your init system.

Make something

Section titled “Make something”
Terminal window
hobby new blog

That creates a project called blog, puts a postgres resource named primary inside it, waits for the database to accept queries, and prints a connection string. The whole thing is one command because that is the ergonomic being copied: a managed platform does not ask you to pick a compute size before you have a table.

If you want the namespace without the database:

Terminal window
hobby new blog --empty

Connect

Section titled “Connect”
Terminal window
hobby connect blog

This opens psql against the resource. The connection string never appears in the argument list of the child process: the credentials are passed through the environment instead, so nothing that reads a process list can see your password. Your own PSQLRC, PAGER and PGSSLMODE still apply.

To get the string itself, for an ORM or a .env:

Terminal window
hobby connect blog --json

That also returns a tailnetConnectionString when the daemon has a tailnet address, which is the one to use from another machine.

Watch it sleep

Section titled “Watch it sleep”
Terminal window
hobby ls
blog
  primary  postgres  running  port 15000

The port on that line is the resource’s own host port, allocated from the 15000 to 19999 range for a direct connection to the container. It is not the port you normally dial: that is the proxy on 5432, which is what makes wake work.

Leave it alone for five minutes and look again. The state becomes sleeping and the container is gone. That default lives in sleepAfterSeconds and is configurable; see configuration.

You can also do it now, rather than waiting:

Terminal window
hobby sleep blog
hobby ls

Watch it wake

Section titled “Watch it wake”
Terminal window
hobby connect blog

There is no hobby wake in that sequence, and that is the entire point. The proxy accepted your connection, noticed the resource was asleep, asked the daemon to start it, waited for Postgres to actually accept queries, and only then completed the handshake. Your client saw one slightly slow connection and never saw an error.

hobby wake blog exists for when you want it warm before something else needs it, not because anything requires you to call it.

Look at it

Section titled “Look at it”
Terminal window
hobby studio passwd     # set the operator password, once
hobby studio            # print the URL

Studio browses tables, runs SQL and reads schema. It is exposed on the network by design, which makes its single operator credential a security boundary rather than a formality. It is also the youngest surface in the project. Put it behind Tailscale or a Cloudflare Tunnel rather than on the open internet. See Studio.

Leave

Section titled “Leave”

The point of the exercise:

Terminal window
hobby eject blog

You get a docker-compose.yml and the data directory. Run docker compose up on any machine with Docker and you have your database back, with no Hobbyist installed anywhere. Add --release and Hobbyist also stops managing it; hobby adopt blog takes it back.

Next

Section titled “Next”