FAQ
Common questions about how Portlane runs, deploys, and keeps your data on-prem
Data and hosting
Does my data ever leave my network?
No, by default. Portlane runs entirely on infrastructure you control — moteurs, Postgres, and the Tour de contrôle all live on your VM. Only the systems your flux explicitly target ever receive data.
Can I self-host on any cloud, or on-prem hardware?
Yes. Portlane ships as a Docker Compose bundle for a single Linux VM or bare metal. We publish sizing guidance for Hetzner Cloud, but any Linux host with Docker works.
Do I need to install anything on Windows or macOS machines?
No. Portlane's moteurs run as Linux containers on your server — there is no per-machine agent to install or maintain. (RPA is an optional complementary module when you need desktop browser automation.)
Licence and Espace client
How do I get my Licence file?
Customers download it from the Espace client. Sign in, open Licence, and download the signed entitlement for your Organisation. The commercial model is a Licence à vie sold on devis — not a subscription, not seats, not metered usage. Download is self-service once BastionLab has activated your Organisation. If no Licence appears, contact BastionLab.
Does Portlane phone home?
Your integration data stays on your instance by default. The supervision layer may optionally report coarse version and health metadata back for support visibility — best-effort telemetry, not DRM, with no effect on how your Activation runs. The data plane never transits through a BastionLab cloud.
Flux and development
How do I build a flux — visually, or as code?
As code. A flux is a small declarative identity card (source, routing, target) plus a pure Python transform, both versioned in your own git repository (portlane-flux) and reviewed like any other change. There is no visual designer.
How does deployment work — do I push to the server?
No, the server only pulls. CI builds a versioned image and publishes routing changes; a self-hosted runner on your instance pulls the new image and applies the change. No inbound access to your server is ever required.
What happens if an enveloppe fails to process?
It is retried with backoff, then moved to a dead-letter state after the retry limit. Operators can inspect it and trigger a rejeu from the Tour de contrôle — nothing is silently dropped.
How do rollbacks work?
Both the Cœur (platform) and your flux code are versioned container images. Rolling back means redeploying a previous, already-tested image — no manual reconfiguration.
Connectors and scope
What systems can Portlane connect to?
Databases, files, APIs, and streams out of the box, plus custom Python connectors for proprietary systems.
How is this different from a typical cloud iPaaS?
Most iPaaS products route your data through a vendor's cloud runtime. Portlane's moteurs run on your own infrastructure — the platform ships to you, not the other way around. Portlane is not an iPaaS, not a full ESB/BPM/MDM suite.
Can Portlane automate a web application that has no API?
That is the direction of the complementary RPA module: a browser automation agent that records a business user's actions once and rejoue them as a repeatable scenario, then delivers the resulting data to Portlane like a connector would. It is aimed at legacy or third-party web apps that expose no API, database, or file interface — without the licensing weight of a general-purpose RPA suite.
Next steps
Still have questions? Demander un devis.