Worker Pods

Not everything you deploy is a website. A Telegram bot, a Discord bot, a queue consumer, a scraper or a cron-driven script has no web server and nothing to serve - but on a normal pod, InstaPods still gives it a public URL, points nginx at it, and issues a certificate. Nothing is listening, so every request comes back as an error, and the platform’s health checks flag the pod as broken. A worker pod is the answer. It’s an ordinary pod in every way except one: it has no public ingress at all.

What changes

	Web pod (default)	Worker pod
Public URL	`my-app.nbg1-1.instapods.app`	none
nginx vhost and TLS certificate	yes	no
DNS record	yes	no
Health checks against the URL	yes	no
SSH, Web Terminal, Web IDE, files, logs	yes	yes
Databases and managed services	yes	yes
Backups	yes	yes

Everything you use to build and operate the pod still works. What goes away is only the front door.

A worker pod has no address to visit, so a browser pointed at its old URL returns “no such host” rather than a misleading 502. That is the correct answer: the pod is running, it just isn’t a website.

Converting a pod

The switch is reversible, and you can flip it at any time.

Dashboard
API

Open the pod, go to the Settings tab, and use the Pod type card. Click Convert to worker (or Convert to web pod to go back).Switching to a worker removes the pod’s public URL, its nginx vhost and its certificate. Switching back regenerates the URL and re-provisions ingress - if the pod is stopped, that happens the next time you start it.

# Convert to a background worker
curl -X POST https://app.instapods.com/api/pods/my-bot/kind \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"kind": "worker"}'

# Convert back to a website
curl -X POST https://app.instapods.com/api/pods/my-bot/kind \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"kind": ""}'

kind accepts "worker" or "" (a normal web pod). Converting to the state the pod is already in is a no-op.

Converting a web pod to a worker drops its domain. Converting back issues a fresh per-host domain - it may not be the same name you had before, and any custom domain will need to be re-pointed. Don’t flip a pod that people are visiting.

Running your code

A worker pod runs the same start command as any other pod. Point it at your long-running process instead of a web server:

# Deploy your code as usual
instapods deploy my-bot

# Watch it run
instapods logs my-bot -n 200

For a Git-deployed worker, set a Custom Start Command on the pod’s Git tab (for example node bot.js or python -m worker) so the deploy knows what to run.

A worker that only needs to run on a schedule doesn’t need to stay resident. Use cron inside the pod (via the Web Terminal or SSH) and keep the pod on the Launch plan.

1-Click Apps

The pod-type switch isn’t offered on 1-Click App pods. Those apps ship a web interface as the whole point of the app, so taking the URL away would leave you no way to use them.

Getting Started

Dashboard

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SSH & Files

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What changes

Converting a pod

Running your code

1-Click Apps

​What changes

​Converting a pod

​Running your code

​1-Click Apps

What changes

Converting a pod

Running your code

1-Click Apps