Configuration reference

Fadebox is configured with environment variables on the app container. Everything here has a working default except the two encryption keys, which the app refuses to start without.

Each variable is the uppercased, underscore form of an underlying property — fadebox.git.cache-dir is FADEBOX_GIT_CACHE_DIR. Durations are ISO-8601 (PT30S, PT5M) unless noted.

Most of what an operator actually configures — runtimes, ingress domains, identity providers, users, groups — is not here. Those are managed in the UI and stored in the database.

Required

Variable	Notes
QUARKUS_HTTP_AUTH_SESSION_ENCRYPTION_KEY	Encrypts the session cookie. At least 16 characters; generate with openssl rand -base64 32. Startup fails without it. Changing it signs everyone out.
FADEBOX_ENCRYPTION_KEY	Encrypts stored credentials at rest — see Secrets at rest. At least 16 characters; generate with openssl rand -base64 32. Startup fails without it. Deliberately a different secret than the session key: changing it makes every stored credential unreadable until re-entered, so keep it stable and back it up.
QUARKUS_DATASOURCE_JDBC_URL	e.g. jdbc:postgresql://db:5432/fadebox.
QUARKUS_DATASOURCE_USERNAME / QUARKUS_DATASOURCE_PASSWORD	Database credentials. The schema is created and migrated on startup.

General

Variable	Default	What it does
FADEBOX_PUBLIC_URL	(unset)	The browser-reachable base URL of this installation. Used by the ingress sign-in flow when sending a visitor of an instance URL here to sign in. Only needed when the URL Traefik reaches Fadebox on is not the one a browser would use.
FADEBOX_DOCKER_HOST	unix:///var/run/docker.sock	The daemon the seeded local runtime points at. Additional runtimes are configured in the UI, not here.
FADEBOX_SECURITY_BOOTSTRAP_ADMIN_ENABLED	true	Creates the admin account with a generated password, logged once, when it is missing. Turn off once you manage accounts another way.

The server's time zone does not matter. Every timestamp is stored and served as an instant — a moment with its offset spelled out — so nothing a viewer sees, and no expiry countdown, depends on the zone the process happens to run in. The only thing that zone reaches is the log output: set TZ on the container if you want logs to read in local time rather than UTC.

Reverse proxy

Fadebox serves plain HTTP and expects a TLS-terminating proxy in front of it. It honours X-Forwarded-Proto, X-Forwarded-Host and X-Forwarded-For so that the session cookie is marked Secure, sign-in redirects keep the browser's scheme and host, and the audit log records the real client address. Forwarding itself is on by default and needs no variable — what it needs is a proxy that actually sends the headers. See the Reverse proxy guide for what to send and for worked Traefik and HAProxy configurations.

Variable	Default	What it does
QUARKUS_HTTP_PROXY_TRUSTED_PROXIES	(unset)	The proxy's own address (IP or CIDR, comma-separated). Unset, every peer is trusted: anything that can reach the HTTP port by another route can choose the scheme and host Fadebox advertises and the client address it writes to the audit log. Set it whenever the port is reachable other than through the proxy — with 8080 published, it generally is. Fadebox logs a warning at startup while this is unset.
QUARKUS_HTTP_PROXY_ENABLE_FORWARDED_PREFIX	false	Turn on only when Fadebox is mounted under a sub-path rather than at the root, and have the proxy send X-Forwarded-Prefix.
QUARKUS_HTTP_PROXY_PROXY_ADDRESS_FORWARDING	true	Whether the forwarding headers are honoured at all. Turn it off only when nothing sits in front of Fadebox — with it off the server reads the socket, so no header can influence what it says about itself.

Deploys

Variable	Default	What it does
FADEBOX_DEPLOY_POOL_SIZE	4	How many deploys run concurrently across the whole installation.
FADEBOX_DEPLOY_START_CONCURRENCY	4	How many services within one deploy may start at once (pull, create, health wait). Parallel pulls can saturate a daemon's disk or network, so lower it on a constrained host; 1 makes starts fully sequential.
FADEBOX_DEPLOY_READY_TIMEOUT	PT5M	Ceiling on waiting for readiness — both the per-wave waits and the final aggregation.
FADEBOX_DEPLOY_CANCEL_GRACE	PT30S	How long a cancel waits for the interrupted deploy worker to return before tearing containers down anyway, so teardown cannot race a worker still creating them.

System images

The images Fadebox pins for itself — the managed ingress stack — pull from Docker Hub as shipped. An air-gapped installation mirrors them into a registry its runtime hosts can reach and points Fadebox at it with one prefix, normally set on Administration → System. This variable is the same setting for an installation provisioned before anyone signs in; the page shows it as the value in force until an admin saves one there.

Variable	Default	What it does
FADEBOX_IMAGE_REGISTRY	(unset)	A registry prefix, not a URL — registry.corp:5000/mirror — prepended verbatim to each pinned reference, so traefik:v3.7 is pulled as registry.corp:5000/mirror/traefik:v3.7. A value saved on the System page overrides it until reset; unset with nothing saved means the pins as shipped. Covers Fadebox's own images only — what your templates name is never rewritten. Read at the next ingress install, no restart.

Instance expiry

Every deploy stamps an instance with an expiry and a sweep stops what has run out — see expiry. The lifetime itself is set per environment; these two are the installation-wide default and the sweep's cadence.

Variable	Default	What it does
FADEBOX_INSTANCE_DEFAULT_TTL	P7D	The lifetime environments that set none of their own inherit. PT0S turns the default off, so those instances never expire — an environment with a lifetime of its own still expires.
FADEBOX_INSTANCE_EXPIRY_SWEEP_INTERVAL	PT1M	How often the sweep runs, and so how closely a stop follows the expiry. Also the delay before the first sweep after a restart.

Instance health

How fadebox keeps each running instance's health current — see that section. Health is derived from the daemon and held in memory, not stored, so nothing here needs a database and a restart simply re-reads. The daemon's event stream does most of the work; the sweep is the safety net behind it.

Variable	Default	What it does
FADEBOX_INSTANCE_HEALTH_EVENTS_ENABLED	true	Subscribe to each runtime's Docker event stream, so a container dying updates health within a second or two instead of at the next sweep. Set to false to rely on the sweep alone.
FADEBOX_INSTANCE_HEALTH_SWEEP_INTERVAL	PT5M	How often the backing sweep re-reads every runtime — the net that catches what the event stream can't (a container that died while fadebox was down, a stream that is down, a runtime added late). Set to off to stop the timer; opening an instance's status and the runtime's Refresh instances button still observe on demand.
FADEBOX_INSTANCE_HEALTH_SWEEP_DELAY	PT5S	The delay before the first sweep after a restart, kept off the startup path so an unreachable runtime cannot hold up boot.

Log export

Caps for the instance log download, counted on raw bytes before zip compression. Docker cannot report a log's size in advance, so the export is scoped and capped rather than size-checked: a breached cap cuts that entry with a visible marker instead of failing the download.

Variable	Default	What it does
FADEBOX_LOGS_EXPORT_DEFAULT_TAIL	100000	Lines per container when the request does not say — the recent end, which is the useful one.
FADEBOX_LOGS_EXPORT_MAX_CONTAINER_BYTES	64M	Ceiling for one container's entry.
FADEBOX_LOGS_EXPORT_MAX_TOTAL_BYTES	256M	Ceiling for the whole archive, allocated fairly across its containers.
FADEBOX_LOGS_EXPORT_MAX_CONCURRENT	2	Simultaneous exports; each holds a worker thread and a daemon read for the whole download. Requests beyond it get a 429.

Git value sources

See Git value sources.

Variable	Default	What it does
FADEBOX_GIT_CACHE_DIR	~/.fadebox/git	Bare-clone cache making fetches incremental. Keep it on a volume — the shipped compose file does. It is an optimization only: an unreachable remote fails the deploy rather than serving stale content.
FADEBOX_GIT_FETCH_TIMEOUT	PT30S	Ceiling on each remote operation.
FADEBOX_GIT_ALLOWED_URL_SCHEMES	https	Schemes a repository URL may use. Deliberately narrow: this is the layer that actually opens the URL, and file:// would read the app container's own filesystem.

Single sign-on

Providers themselves are database rows managed in the UI — see OIDC single sign-on. Only these two are environment variables.

Variable	Default	What it does
FADEBOX_SECURITY_OIDC_REGISTRY_REFRESH_INTERVAL	60s	How stale a provider edit made on another app instance may be here. A write on this instance applies immediately. Also the pickup interval for a row inserted straight into the database.
FADEBOX_SECURITY_OIDC_ALLOWED_ISSUER_SCHEMES	https	Schemes an admin-supplied issuer URL may use. The server fetches the discovery document from it, so it is an outbound-request surface even though only a global admin can set one.

:::info Removed variables

QUARKUS_OIDC_TENANT_ENABLED, QUARKUS_OIDC_AUTH_SERVER_URL, QUARKUS_OIDC_CLIENT_ID, QUARKUS_OIDC_CREDENTIALS_SECRET, FADEBOX_SECURITY_OIDC_PROVIDER_NAME and FADEBOX_SECURITY_OIDC_AUTO_PROVISION configured the old single-provider SSO. They no longer exist — providers are managed at runtime instead. Delete them from your compose file.

:::

Audit log

Enterprise

Recording follows the license's Enterprise entitlement — there is deliberately no on/off switch here. See Audit log.

Variable	Default	What it does
FADEBOX_AUDIT_LOG_MIRROR	false	Additionally emits every recorded event as one JSON line on the fadebox.audit logger, for shipping to a SIEM through the log pipeline. The database remains the source of truth.
FADEBOX_AUDIT_RETENTION	(unset)	How long events are kept; unset keeps them forever. When set (ISO-8601, e.g. P365D), older events are purged — and the purge records its own audit.purged event on every tier, so the log never shrinks silently. Deliberately configuration-only, with no UI.
FADEBOX_AUDIT_RETENTION_SWEEP_INTERVAL	PT1H	How often the retention purge runs, when retention is set.

Licensing

Normally the license is pasted in Administration → License and stored in the database — see Licensing. The first two exist for infrastructure-as-code installs; a pasted license takes precedence over either.

Variable	Default	What it does
FADEBOX_LICENSE	(unset)	The license token itself. Unset means the Free tier.
FADEBOX_LICENSE_PATH	(unset)	Path to a file holding the token (e.g. a compose secret). Setting both variables fails startup, as does a path that cannot be read.
FADEBOX_LICENSE_STORE_URL	https://store.fadebox.io	Where the License page's Upgrade to Team and Upgrade to Enterprise links point. The links are composed in the browser and opened only when clicked; the server never calls the store. Leave it alone unless support tells you otherwise.

Secrets at rest

Registry passwords, git repository tokens, runtime mTLS client keys, ACME DNS credentials and OIDC client secrets are write-only against the API — accepted on save, never returned — and encrypted in the database (AES-256-GCM) under FADEBOX_ENCRYPTION_KEY, so a database dump or backup does not leak them. User passwords and API keys are hashed, not encrypted.

Two things this does not change: the key lives on the app host, so a full compromise of that host still yields the credentials — the encryption protects the database, its backups, and SQL-level access, not the host itself. And losing the key means losing the stored credentials: they cannot be read back out, only re-entered. Back the key up alongside the database.