Porter

Porter is an open source tool for building, installing, and managing bundles that describe the full lifecycle of application deployments using the Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB) specification (infrastructure automation / application lifecycle management).

• Authoring, building, and packaging Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB) that capture application plus infrastructure deployment workflows (infrastructure automation).
• Executing install, upgrade, and uninstall actions for bundles as repeatable deployment workflows (release orchestration).
• Extensible plugin architecture for credentials, storage, and mixins that integrate external tools into bundles (platform extensibility).
• Support for composition of multiple tools and scripts into a single, portable bundle definition (deployment workflow orchestration).
• Use of declarative bundle manifests, parameters, credentials, and outputs to manage environment-specific configuration (configuration management).

More About Porter

Porter is a CNAB-compliant (infrastructure automation) tool that focuses on packaging the complete deployment and lifecycle of an application, including infrastructure, configuration, and operational tasks, into a single, installable bundle. It addresses the problem of coordinating multiple tools, scripts, and platforms that are often required to deploy cloud-native applications across different environments.

At its core, Porter provides capabilities for defining Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB) using declarative manifests that describe what tools to run, in what order, and with which configuration values. A bundle can encapsulate operations such as provisioning infrastructure, deploying services, running database migrations, configuring Domain Name System (DNS), and performing teardown actions. Porter implements the CNAB specification (deployment packaging standard), which defines how bundles are described, versioned, parameterized, and executed in a portable way across runtimes that understand CNAB.

Porter uses a system of mixins (tool integration) to embed external tools and CLIs directly into bundles. Mixins allow authors to call technologies such as infrastructure as code tools, container orchestration systems, or scripting runtimes from within the bundle workflow, while keeping the bundle definition declarative. Through this approach, Porter treats infrastructure and application operations as a single unit, allowing deployment and lifecycle steps that span multiple technical domains to be captured and executed consistently.

The tool also supports plugins (platform extensibility) for elements such as credential management and storage of installation records. Credentials and parameters are modeled explicitly in the bundle definition, enabling enterprises to manage secrets and configuration values separately from the operational logic while still passing them into installations in a controlled way. Outputs from bundle executions can be captured and reused, enabling chained workflows and integration into broader platform automation.

In enterprise and institutional environments, Porter is used as part of platform engineering and Release Automation (RA) practices to standardize how complex deployments are described and run. Teams can version, distribute, and install bundles across environments, integrate Porter into Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and use CNAB-compatible registries to store and share bundles. Because it adheres to the CNAB specification, Porter participates in an ecosystem of tools that understand the same bundle format, which supports portability across different runtimes and operational contexts.

From a directory and taxonomy perspective, Porter fits into the categories of infrastructure automation, application lifecycle management, and deployment packaging under the broader cloud-native and CNAB ecosystem maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).