TL;DR: We’ve launched Fern Self-Hosted Docs and SDKs, a solution that enables enterprises to manage their Fern deployment on their own infrastructure. See our documentation for Docs & SDKs for more information.
Over the past few months, we’ve heard a consistent theme from customers in government, healthcare, financial services, and other regulated industries: they need the option to host Fern on-prem or in a private cloud.
While our hosted offering works well for most teams, it can fall short for organizations that require greater control over their deployments. In particular, industries with strict data residency, compliance, and audit standards.
Until now, those teams were left to build custom tooling themselves. Today, we’re introducing Fern Self-Hosted Docs and SDKs, giving enterprises the ability to meet their regulatory requirements without compromising on developer experience.
Design decision: prioritize providing a great developer experience
When building a self-hosted option, we had many paths we could take. Take for example Self-Hosted Docs. A static export (like PDFs) would have been a simple solution, but would also strip away the interactivity that developers expect. On the other hand, we could replicate the elements of a hosted Fern experience, including search, API explorers, and live integrations.
We chose the latter. Our goal was clear: self-hosting shouldn’t mean a lesser developer experience.
For Docs, we re-engineered core components, including replacing Algolia with Meilisearch and utilizing MinIO to emulate our backend, ensuring everything runs smoothly within a Docker container.
For SDKs, we enabled seamless local hosting within Docker containers, giving teams full control over their environments. Our team provides dedicated support for advanced requirements such as custom authentication methods and publishing to private package managers like npm and PyPI - allowing organizations to securely distribute SDKs within their own infrastructure.
Benefits of self-hosted Docs and SDKs
Beyond meeting regulatory requirements, self-hosting brings tangible benefits, namely more control over your dev environment.
- Deploy on your own infrastructure: Run Fern on-prem or in your private cloud. This ensures full control over where your data and content live.
- Flexible set-up with Docker images: Get up and running quickly using pre-built Docker images. Integrate with existing CI/CD pipelines, customize networking, and adapt the deployment to align with your organization’s infrastructure standards.
- Choose when to upgrade: Have complete flexibility of how and when you deploy.
How self-hosted Docs work
Fern provides your documentation site as a ready-to-run Docker container that you can deploy on your own infrastructure (more details in our documentation):
- Download the Docker image: Fern provides the location of the most up-to-date Docker image containing the documentation frontend
- Upload your fern folder: Add your documentation source files to the container
- Run the container: Spin up your local server using standard Docker commands
- Configure hosting: Set up your server environment and decide how to publish/share the documentation
- Receive updated Docker images: Fern releases new versions of the Docker image that your team can evaluate and deploy when ready
How self-hosted SDKs work
When you run fern generate, Fern uses Docker containers to execute SDK generation logic. By default, Fern runs cloud generation by allocating compute space and running the container remotely. With self-hosted (local) generation, you download and run the same Docker container on your own infrastructure.
Both approaches generate partial SDK files to your configured output location, then Fern verifies your organization registration and completes the SDK by adding package distribution files.
The self-hosted process works as follows (more details in our documentation):
- Download the Docker image - Fern provides the location of the most up-to-date Docker image containing the SDK generation logic
- Upload your fern folder - Add your API definition and other configuration files to the container
- Run the container - Execute SDK generation using standard Docker commands
- Partial SDK output - Core SDK files are generated and saved to your configured output location (local file system, GitHub repository, package registry, etc.)
- Organization verification - Fern verifies your organization registration and completes SDK generation by adding package distribution files like pyproject.toml, READMEs, and dependency configurations
- Receive updated Docker images - Fern releases new versions of the Docker image that your team can evaluate and deploy when ready
Explore self-hosted today
Interested in deploying Fern Self-Hosted Docs and SDKs on your own infrastructure? We’d love to help you get started. Reach out to learn more about setup, pricing, and how we can tailor self-hosting to your organization’s needs.
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