Banyan Labs

Infrastructure, tooling, and DevOps scaffolding for small to medium enterprises — built to scale from zero to ~600 engineers.

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What is Banyan Labs?

Banyan Labs is an open, opinionated infrastructure and DevOps framework designed to help engineering teams — from solo founders to mid-size companies — bootstrap, manage, and scale their technical stack with consistency and confidence.

It is not a SaaS product. It is a living repository of patterns, tools, scripts, and services that teams can adopt, fork, and extend.

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Vision

The goal is to give small and medium engineering teams the same infrastructure discipline that large companies have, without the overhead of building it all from scratch.

Target scale: Teams up to ~2,000 people, ~600 engineers. Not intended for: Hyperscalers like Google, Apple, or Oracle.

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Roadmap

Phase 1 — Foundation (Months 1–3)

• Set up project structure, tooling wrappers, and documentation
• Implement Bash bootstrapping layer
• Implement Python setup and CLI layer
• Define YAML manifest-based dependency management
• Build core Bash standard library (logging, error handling)
• Build Python virtual environment management
• Daily progress tracked via GitHub Issues

Phase 2 — Collaboration

• Onboard ex-colleagues and contributors
• Expand multi-repo support
• Formalize contribution guidelines

Phase 3 — Public Launch

• Announce to the broader DevOps and engineering community
• Gather feedback and iterate

Phase 4 — Commercial Viability

• Explore sustainable monetization models
• Build partnerships with cloud providers and tooling vendors

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Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Bootstrapping	Bash
Scripting & Glue	Python
CLIs (performance-critical)	Go
Services (learning & production)	Go, Java
Infrastructure as Code	Terraform
Configuration formats	YAML, HCL (HashiCorp), JSON
Package/dependency manifest	Custom YAML manifest
Version control	Git (GitHub)
Issue tracking	GitHub Issues

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Architecture Overview

Two-Layer Setup System

Setup is intentionally split into two layers:

Layer 1 — Bash Bootstrap

• Ensures Homebrew is installed
• Installs Python via Homebrew
• Installs any system-level prerequisites (e.g. Xcode CLI tools)
• Hands off to the Python layer once the environment is ready

Layer 2 — Python Setup

• Reads a YAML manifest that defines all tools, packages, and services to install
• Manages installation order (respecting inter-package dependencies)
• Manages Python virtual environments per project
• Handles cloning of additional repositories required for a company's full stack

Wrapper Pattern

Every CLI — whether Bash or Python — is invoked through a wrapper, not directly. This avoids boilerplate repetition and enforces consistency.

Bash Wrapper

• Sources the Bash standard library (logging, error handling, utilities)
• Sets up common environment variables
• Discovers and invokes the target Bash script

Python Wrapper

• Activates the correct Python virtual environment
• Discovers the target Python CLI by convention
• Passes arguments through cleanly

CLI Structure Convention

Every Python CLI is a directory (package), not a standalone file. Each CLI directory contains:

my-cli/
  __init__.py
  main.py
  README.md
  tests/
  submodules/

YAML Manifest

All dependencies — Python packages, system tools, CLIs, services — are declared in a single YAML manifest. There is no requirements.txt or setup.py. The Python setup layer reads the manifest and handles installation.

This keeps configuration unified, readable, and language-agnostic.

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Multi-Repo Design

Banyan Labs is designed to be the onboarding and bootstrapping layer for an entire company's technical ecosystem. It is not a monorepo.

• Banyan Labs itself is the entry point
• The YAML manifest can reference and clone additional repositories
• Each product team, service, or tooling area lives in its own repo
• Banyan Labs orchestrates the setup of the full environment in one step

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Repository Structure

banyan-labs/
  README.md
  docs/
    01-vision.md
    02-architecture.md
    03-setup-strategy.md
    04-multi-repo-design.md
    05-tech-stack.md
    06-cli-conventions.md
    07-yaml-manifest-spec.md
  scripts/
    wrapper.sh           # Bash wrapper
    wrapper.py           # Python wrapper
    bootstrap.sh         # Layer 1 setup
    lib/
      stdlib.sh          # Bash standard library
  setup/
    setup.py             # Layer 2 Python setup entrypoint
    manifest.yaml        # Dependency manifest
  services/
    url-shortener/       # Example Go service (learning project)
  infra/
    terraform/
  .github/
    ISSUE_TEMPLATE/

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Git Workflow

• All work is done on feature branches, never directly on main
• Branch naming convention: <initials>-<MMDD>-<short-description>-<issue-number>
  • Example: pd-0411-bash-stdlib-12
• Every branch is backed by a GitHub Issue
• PRs are opened against main and merged after self-review
• Branches are deleted after merge

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Dependency Philosophy

• No requirements.txt
• No setup.py
• All Python dependencies are declared in manifest.yaml
• The Python setup layer installs them in the declared order
• This project is not distributed as a pip-installable package — it is used directly from the repo

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Documentation

All architecture decisions, design rationale, and implementation notes are documented in /docs. Markdown files are numbered to indicate reading order. The main README.md links to all docs.

When sharing project context with other tools (e.g. OpenAI Codex), paste the relevant docs to provide architectural grounding.

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Status

Current phase: Phase 1 — active development started April 2025.

Progress is tracked daily via GitHub Issues.

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Contributing

Collaboration opens in Phase 2. If you are one of the initial collaborators, reach out directly. Public contributions will be welcomed in Phase 3 after the initial structure is stable.

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Banyan Labs — Infrastructure that grows with you.