For teams and businesses
Cold Crabby is one engine you can put wherever your work happens: on each person's machine, on a server everyone shares, or in a script that never touches a UI at all.
This section is for whoever sets that up. If you just want to slice something, start at Getting started.
Pick a shape
| Good for | Trade-off | |
|---|---|---|
| Desktop app on each machine | Small teams, designers with their own printers | Profiles live per machine unless you export/import |
| One self-hosted server | Workshops, print farms, shared printers | You run a server |
| CLI in a pipeline | Automated slicing, batch jobs, CI | No UI |
| Public browser build | Contractors, one-off collaborators | Their profiles live in their browser |
They aren't exclusive. A common arrangement is a self-hosted server as the shared source of truth for profiles and history, with the desktop app for whoever wants offline work.
Why self-host
Profiles survive. In a browser tab, profiles live in that browser — clearing site data loses them. On a server they're stored server-side and every browser on the network sees the same library.
Printers actually connect. A browser can't talk to most printers directly: Moonraker doesn't send the CORS headers browsers require. A self-hosted server talks to printers over the network from the server process, so it just works.
Files stay inside. Models are uploaded to your server and nowhere else. Nothing leaves your network.
Plate history is shared. A plate sliced at one workstation reopens at another.
Standardise your settings
Two mechanisms, for two different jobs.
Profiles are the user-facing library — printers, filaments, print profiles, labels. Export the library once from a machine that's set up correctly and import it everywhere else. Exports strip API keys, so they're safe to commit to a repo or hand out.
slicer.toml is the machine-facing config: layered defaults for the CLI and the server. A project-level slicer.toml checked in beside a job's models pins exactly how that job is sliced.
Automate it
The CLI slices without a UI, takes multiple models per plate, arranges them, and emits machine-readable JSON. That's enough to slice on commit, batch a folder of parts overnight, or quote a job from its G-code.
Before you commit
Licensing. All rights reserved until a licence is chosen. Ask before deploying commercially.
Maturity. Pre-1.0. The engine is tested continuously against reference models and G-code quality gates, but treat it as software you validate against your own parts before it prints unattended.
No accounts. A self-hosted instance is single-tenant with no authentication — one shared library, one shared history. Put it behind your own access control if it's exposed beyond a trusted network.