Hestia R* Edition

It didn't stay a fork.

HestiaRE started as a fork of HestiaCP. What it's becoming is something else: a stripped-down, dependency-light base that isn't trying to be a drop-in HestiaCP replacement. It's trying to be easy to fork again.

Most self-hosted panel projects accumulate dependent users, people running someone else's release pipeline, someone else's apt repository, someone else's opinions about what belongs in the stack. HestiaRE inverts that. It doesn't want dependent users, it wants to make it cheap for someone else to run their own variant, with their own opinions, without inheriting a build toolchain or a package infrastructure they never signed up for.

No compiled binaries, no custom apt repository, no build step required on the target host. Just source, a git tag, and a single tarball a bootstrap script extracts and hands off to. Forking HestiaRE costs a git clone, not a release infrastructure.

What changed, at a glance.

The honest way to describe a fork is a diff. Here's the shape of it.

Two external repos. That's it.

HestiaCP bundles and compiles a lot of its own stack. HestiaRE inverts that: OS repositories are the default, and every external source has to justify itself. In practice that leaves exactly two, Sury (multi-version PHP) and MariaDB, with everything else, web, mail, database, firewall tooling, coming straight from the distribution.

• Optional components, ProFTPD, ClamAV, PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch, the file manager and more, are individually installable and removable, so a given host only carries what it actually uses.
• The result tracks the distributions' own security updates instead of a private package pipeline.

Four targets, equal priority.

Every feature is expected to work identically across all four. None is a second-class target.

Human-reviewed, agent-assisted.

HestiaRE is developed through agentic AI-assisted development. An AI agent writes and iterates on code, scripts, and documentation, while every change is reviewed, tested, and merged exclusively by a human maintainer. No commit reaches main without human review. The agent proposes, the human decides.