Native Runtimes

Run your app in an environment that's pre-configured for your language.

Render provides native runtimes for the following programming languages:

  • JavaScript / TypeScript (supports both Node.js and Bun)
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Go
  • Rust
  • Elixir

Each native runtime preloads your service's environment with relevant utilities for its language. This enables you to set common build and start commands for your service (e.g., npm install and npm start) without first needing to install the corresponding tools.

You set your service's runtime while creating your service and can change it later if needed.

What about Docker?

Render also provides two Docker-specific runtimes: one for building from a Dockerfile and one for pulling a prebuilt image.

Use Docker in the following scenarios:

  • Your application already uses Docker.
  • Render doesn't provide a native runtime for your application's language (e.g., PHP, .NET, or a JVM-based language).
  • You want full control over which tools and libraries are present (and absent) in your runtime environment.

Changing a service's runtime

You can change an existing service's runtime in any of the following ways:

Changing runtimes via Dashboard

  1. From your service's Settings page in the Render Dashboard, scroll down to the Build section.

  2. Under Source, click Edit.

    The Update Source dialog appears:

    The Update Source dialog in the Render Dashboard

  3. Select your service's current backing Git repo or Docker image (or select a new source if you're also changing it).

  4. The Update Source dialog now prompts you to specify a Branch and Runtime, along with build and start commands (unless you're using Docker):

    The Update Source dialog in the Render Dashboard

  5. Provide values for these fields based on your new runtime and click Deploy.

Render kicks off a deploy using your new runtime and configuration.

Tools and utilities

All Render native runtimes run on Debian 12.x, "bookworm", which includes a broad general-purpose build toolchain.

Additionally, all native runtimes include the tools listed below.

To use a tool that isn't included in Render's native runtimes, or to omit tools you don't need, you can deploy with Docker instead.

🟢Available both during builds and at runtime
🟨Available during builds only
  • 🟢 bun
  • 🟢 curl
  • 🟢 ffmpeg
  • 🟢 g++
  • 🟢 gcc
  • 🟢 gettext
  • 🟢 ghostscript
  • 🟢 git
  • 🟢 gnupg2
  • 🟢 imagemagick
  • 🟢 jq
  • 🟢 libvips-dev
  • 🟢 libvips-tools
  • 🟢 make
  • 🟢 nano
  • 🟢 node
  • 🟢 npm
  • 🟢 pandoc
  • 🟨 pigz
  • 🟢 pnpm
  • 🟢 postgresql-client
  • 🟢 postgresql-client-12
  • 🟢 postgresql-client-13
  • 🟢 postgresql-client-14
  • 🟢 princexml
  • 🟢 python3-dev
  • 🟢 python3-pip
  • 🟢 python3-setuptools
  • 🟢 rsync
  • 🟢 sqlite3
  • 🟢 swig
  • 🟢 typescript
  • 🟢 unzip
  • 🟢 vim
  • 🟢 webpack
  • 🟢 wget
  • 🟢 yarn
  • 🟢 zip

Feature support

All native runtimes support the same set of platform-wide features, including: