Not everything you run lives in a process-compose.yaml. A standalone service
is registered directly with the daemon and persisted in the registry with no
backing file, handy for a one-off dev server, a local proxy, or a tool you
want supervised without authoring a compose file for it.
Add one from the dashboard with a: name, command, working directory, an
optional route, an optional alias port, optional
tags, a restart policy, and the autostart flag. The form
validates live against the daemon, so name collisions and malformed routes
surface before you save.
Standalone services are full citizens: they start, stop, restart, scale, route,
and autostart exactly like stack members. The only difference is provenance:
the registry is their source of truth, so they are edited in place (e) and
removed cleanly (x), with no file to drift out of sync.
Renaming is deliberately not supported: the id is the service's identity across logs, journals, and routes. Delete and recreate to rename.
See also: stacks and import for the file-backed path.