Starting this new thread to prepare for submission to the CA.

I've been working on this project for the past couple of weeks, and I think I'm at the point where other people can start trying it out!

StaXX

Docker Compose stacks for Unraid, with a form instead of YAML. StaXX is a plugin for Unraid 7.2+ that manages your containers using standard Docker Compose stacks instead of Unraid's XML templates. Paste in a compose file from anywhere, and it just runs. If you would rather not touch YAML, StaXX reads the file and builds a settings form from it, so you can configure a container the same way you do today. Whatever you save is still a plain compose file that works unmodified anywhere else. I've been building in lots and lots of features with a lot of automation as well that automatically fills things in like file paths and will automatically connect the same values that are used in a multi-service stack or even across stacks! Honestly, I can't keep up with all the things that I've been shoving into this! I'm working on updating all of the documentation as well, but you can try it out and let me know what you think. I think it's pretty intuitive.

Key Features

• Runs standard compose files, unchanged

• Intelligently turns a compose file into a settings form

• Imports and converts your existing Unraid template containers

• Imports a Docker Hub image as a starting stack; just give it the URL

• Groups stacks into folders on one page (Replaces FolderView)

• Start, stop, restart, recreate, realtime logs, shell and file manager for each service

• Checks for image updates on an intelligent learning schedule

• Roll back to a previous image build or historical YAML version independently

• Pin an image to one exact build

• Keeps an edit history of each compose file

• Autostart with the server and chosen order

• Export a stack as a shareable bundle*

• Optionally integrates deeply within the Unraid UI

GitHub: https://github.com/quadcom/Staxx

Feedback and feature requests: https://staxxfb.quadcom.ca

Bug reports and ideas are welcome on the feedback board. Tell me what breaks.

I'll be releasing v 00.02.00 in a little while. It's a pretty big one, lots of tweaks and cleanup happening.

Edited September 3Sep 3 by aglyons

CA Submission is in! Fingers crossed ;)

So the plugin has been on the Unraid CA for a little while now, and I see that there have been some people downloading it, so that's always cool to see.

https://ca.unraid.net/apps/staxx-0626nzk0azbrks

I would love to hear feedback from people: what they love, what they hate, and what they'd like to see different. Feedback is always great to hear.

While you can write stuff in this thread. I'll check it from time to time. If there is something very pressing, then by all means post a card up on my bug tracker/feature tracker that's dedicated to Staxx.

https://staxxfb.quadcom.ca/

I really hope this is a plugin that people find useful and really come to like.

Staxx came at the perfect time for me this week! I needed to roll out a new docker "stack" on my machine, and I finally decided to try and do it in compose to keep things cleaner. I happened to find Staxx in CA while I was considering the latest compose options, and after seeing the feature set, I decided to take it for a spin.

I have not completely migrated all my dockers over, but I have set up a new Staxx stack from a compose file, installed an app from CA into Staxx, and migrated an existing container over to Staxx. All went pretty well! After gaining a little bit of knowledge through experimentation and exploring the Staxx UI, I was able to find the features I was looking for and get a number of containers running and working as expected in my environment.

Overall, I am impressed with the abilities of the plugin. Since I'm not a regular compose user, I might not understand what Staxx may be missing that would be beneficial for doing complex compose setups, but for typical, everyday setups, I found it pretty easy to get comfortable with and use. Though, I found a couple bugs, and have a few suggestions which I will list below, I plan to continue to use this plugin for my docker needs in preparation for compose integration in Unraid 8. I hope the @limetech devs take note of this plugins functionality as they work on the next native implementation. This solution checks a lot of boxes!

Edited September 17Sep 17 by JesterEE

Feedback:

• It took me a while to notice the 'add file' buttons for the compose configuration. Now that I see it, it's obvious, but it took me forever to find it. Maybe it's just me, but if the '+' button were closer to the compose.yaml tab like it appears on modern web browser UIs, I think I would have found it faster.

• Dragging and dropping a stack onto a folder will yield an error "Only a ".staxx" bundle can be dropped here." I realize this is not the proper way to add a stack to a folder, but it is intuitive to perform this action since it looks like a file explorer, and it doesn't do what was expected.

Bugs:

• .env files do not display blank lines. Also causes navigation/display corruption in the editor.

• Staxx does not respect the Unraid lock sortable items UI element.

• Folder Collapse/Expand arrows always displays "Collapse" regardless of state

• Unable to return to split view after selecting Form/Compose view

Feature Requests (by desire level):

1. Dashboard docker widget integration (Similar to FolderView3)

2. Stack/Folder custom icons (Similar to FolderView3)

3. Notification/Automerge of upstream docker compose environment (YAML, env files, etc.) modifications

   • One of my biggest gripes with the current Unraid docker template system is that when a docker template is updated by the author, there is no way for a current user to easily merge the changes into the template deployed in Unraid. Staxx offers an infrastructure that could do this better while not compromising user modifications to the upstream configs.

Edited September 17Sep 17 by JesterEE

Hey @JesterEE , thanks for checking out the project. I hope this is all still relevant once UR8 is released, with them jumping into the compose situation as well.

I addressed your concerns, all except one as I can't seem to replicate the problem. Folder Collapse/Expand arrows. They change on my system, and I've reviewed the code there as well. SO I can't explain why you're seeing that.

In the future, submitting bugs or feature requests is best done on my board: https://staxxfb.quadcom.ca/. You can paste screenshots directly into posts, which seems difficult, if not impossible, on these boards. I'll be working on adding in-app bug reporting soon that will make the process even simpler.

Again, thanks for checking Staxx out. I also really appreciate the feedback and the review!

@JesterEE

I wanted to touch on the features you asked for.

1. Dashboard docker widget integration (Similar to FolderView3)

I can look into this. Can you describe what you would want to see there? I think shoving all your services would get the dashboard cluttered pretty quick. Pinning specific items might be useful. But could operational statistics, resource graphs stuff like that, is that something that would be a good addition?

2. Stack/Folder custom icons (Similar to FolderView3)

The main stack icon, as it stands right now, is a tiled view of the defined services. If you set the service icons as you like, the stack icon will reflect a tiled composite of them. For folders, I hadn't considered changing the folder icon itself, but I can add that to the possibilities list.

3. Notification/Automerge of an upstream docker compose environment (YAML, env files, etc.) modifications

4. One of my biggest gripes with the current Unraid docker template system is that when a docker template is updated by the author, there is no way for a current user to easily merge the changes into the template deployed in Unraid. Staxx offers and infrastructure that could do this better while not compromising user modifications to the upstream configs.

So StaXX does have automatic metadata and project example scanning along with automatic service icon pulling. It's by no means complete, as there's no defined standard. What it does is scan GitHub repos linked to the service, pull in the example compose file, and suggest items your current YAML is missing or items your YAML has that the examples don't. This covers new features that a repo might add to a project that require ENV vars or other accommodations in order to take advantage of. Another function is tracking when an image moves from one repository to another, such as when the source image used to be on Docker Hub but is now hosted under GHIO. It ensures it is the same author and doesn't just point you to some random image with the same name.

On 9/17/2026 at 3:00 PM, aglyons said:

Hey @JesterEE , thanks for checking out the project. I hope this is all still relevant once UR8 is released, with them jumping into the compose situation as well.

I addressed your concerns, all except one as I can't seem to replicate the problem. Folder Collapse/Expand arrows. They change on my system, and I've reviewed the code there as well. SO I can't explain why you're seeing that.

In the future, submitting bugs or feature requests is best done on my board: https://staxxfb.quadcom.ca/. You can paste screenshots directly into posts, which seems difficult, if not impossible, on these boards. I'll be working on adding in-app bug reporting soon that will make the process even simpler.

Again, thanks for checking Staxx out. I also really appreciate the feedback and the review!

Your welcome! It's really been nice updating my homelab with StaXX. IMHO docker compose is now necessary for deploying most docker services on a homelab. Gone are the days of spinning up a single container to handle a whole workload, and StaXX makes the transition from individual, disparate images to organized stacks bearable. I'm glad I found it when I did!

Thanks for hearing out my comments and feedback! I have already been using some of the features you implemented and I'm finding less "gotchas' as I use the tool. Originally I tried to use your dev board to submit my bugs and requests, but it asked me to create a login. Sorry to say, this was a dealbreaker for me using your submission system . I understand why this makes it easier for you as you work with your AI assistant to make the tool better, but for me as a user, it's just one more set of credentials I have to manage for a system I won't use more than a few times. I understand why you'd want/need a login mechanism for this service to keep the garbage out of your tracker, but to encourage user input, might I suggest a different means of verification like OpenID Connect. This might be overkill for your project, but it also may encourage others to contribute.

About the Collapse/Expand arrows, I still see it on my end, but I have been experiencing issues with the Docker page on my server updating dynamic events properly (e.g. refreshing after an update). I believe this may be due to the FolderView3 plugin, which is mostly pretty great, but can be somewhat wonky at times. Using the STaXX settings, I moved StaXX it to it's own page to hopefully remove any plugin conflicts with the default docker page, but I still see this issue. Take this as a grain of salt as this very well could be a me issue and I'm ok with that; it's extremely minor and does not affect the way StaXX works. See included screenshots of a simple folder with a single stack.

Thanks again for working on this and I will report back if I find anything else as I continue to migrate images and deploy new services.

On 9/17/2026 at 3:15 PM, aglyons said:

@JesterEE

I wanted to touch on the features you asked for.

1. Dashboard docker widget integration (Similar to FolderView3)

I can look into this. Can you describe what you would want to see there? I think shoving all your services would get the dashboard cluttered pretty quick. Pinning specific items might be useful. But could operational statistics, resource graphs stuff like that, is that something that would be a good addition?

2. Stack/Folder custom icons (Similar to FolderView3)

The main stack icon, as it stands right now, is a tiled view of the defined services. If you set the service icons as you like, the stack icon will reflect a tiled composite of them. For folders, I hadn't considered changing the folder icon itself, but I can add that to the possibilities list.

3. Notification/Automerge of an upstream docker compose environment (YAML, env files, etc.) modifications

4. One of my biggest gripes with the current Unraid docker template system is that when a docker template is updated by the author, there is no way for a current user to easily merge the changes into the template deployed in Unraid. Staxx offers and infrastructure that could do this better while not compromising user modifications to the upstream configs.

So StaXX does have automatic metadata and project example scanning along with automatic service icon pulling. It's by no means complete, as there's no defined standard. What it does is scan GitHub repos linked to the service, pull in the example compose file, and suggest items your current YAML is missing or items your YAML has that the examples don't. This covers new features that a repo might add to a project that require ENV vars or other accommodations in order to take advantage of. Another function is tracking when an image moves from one repository to another, such as when the source image used to be on Docker Hub but is now hosted under GHIO. It ensures it is the same author and doesn't just point you to some random image with the same name.

1. The ask here is a StaXX dashboard widget that replicates/overrides the docker widget's functionality with folder/stack layering. See the included image of a sample of my docker widget with the FolderView3 tweaks enabled on my server's dashboard. Note that there are "folders" for grouped services which are expandable/collapsible, and all the other non-grouped services are listed below it. Show started only vs show all remains intact, and the docker grouping I implemented in the plugin is preserved on the dashboard widget. I can control the running status, launch the WebUI, command prompt, log window, etc. right from the dashboard. Currently, I have FolderView3 working with StaXX to provide this functionality. For example, in the image I shared, the ddns-updater container is deployed in StaXX while Nginx Proxy Manager is deployed as a normal docker. Even though Unraid registers my ddns-updater container as managed by compose, it still lists it in the docker page and thus still applies the folder rules I set in FolderView3 to group it with my other Networking containers. I'd like to abandon all need for FolderView3 with a complete migration to StaXX and this it a hold-out feature for me. It is also why I requested adding custom stack/folder icons in (2).

2. One thing that FolderView3 can do that I really like is using 3rd party icons for folders; specifically hernandito's Animated "Docker-Folder" Icons for unRAID. Is it functional? No. Is it silly? Yes! But, we are simple creatures and it brings me joy to see nice animated images for my deployed services.

3. & 4. I was surprised to see many projects don't offer a source of truth docker compose YAML file indicating the many options available to the container. This was a little surprising for me coming from Unraid templates which, more or less, usually include a means for full configurability of the container from the source template. Now that I know this, StaXX is doing a good job at trying it's best to be smart, but the source maintainers aren't making it easy. This is yet another challenge the Unraid devs face as they embrace compose in the future. For StaXX, I think you're doing the best you can, and I can't think of a better way to do it so please disregard these requests. I hope a better solution emerges in the future, and if that happens, I think you already have the infrastructure in StaXX to embrace it.

I know I compared StaXX to FolderView3 a bunch, but I think StaXX gets to the real heart of the matter while FolderView3 just masks the inherent limitations of a non-compose based deployment in the Unraid GUI. I think StaXX is in a position to do it all better, but the lessons learned through the development of the many iterations of FolderView should not go to waste. If you are unfamiliar with FolderView and don't want to install it to see (I get it!), I suggest watching a few of AlienTech42's YouTube videos on the configuration of the plugin so you see what it can do and how StaXX can benefit.

Edited Friday at 04:27 PM1 day by JesterEE