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Key Concepts

Understand the core building blocks of Lawn — the catalog, instances, and containers.

Lawn lives in your menu bar and gives you quick access to all your self-hosted apps. Click the Lawn icon to see your installed apps at a glance. From here you can:

See which apps are running or stopped
Open any app's web UI in your browser
Start or stop apps with one click

Catalog

The catalog is a curated collection of self-hosted apps that have been tested and configured to work out of the box on your Mac. Each app in the catalog is a pre-built template that handles all the setup.

Instances

When you install an app from the catalog, Lawn creates an instance — your personal copy of that app with its own data and configuration. You can install multiple instances of the same app if needed.

Containers

Each instance runs inside one or more Linux containers. Containers are isolated environments that keep apps separate from each other and from your Mac. You don't need to understand containers to use Lawn — they work behind the scenes.