A real app store
Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Ollama with Open WebUI, VS Code Server, a file manager — one click each, no compose files. Plus a community catalog and a sideload form for any other Docker image.
Home Server OS turns a Raspberry Pi or a small x86 box into a private home cloud: media, files, passwords, a local LLM and full Linux desktops, all installed with one click and all staying in your house.
Pre-release. The OS runs and is used daily on a Raspberry Pi, but it is not ready for anyone else to install yet: no flashable image has been published, the source is not public, and the x86 build is untested. This page describes what exists today, not what is planned.
Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Ollama with Open WebUI, VS Code Server, a file manager — one click each, no compose files. Plus a community catalog and a sideload form for any other Docker image.
Every installed app is compared against its registry by manifest digest, so a full sweep costs a few kilobytes rather than a pull. If an update fails to start, the previous image is put back.
Ubuntu desktops in a container, ready in about a minute and light enough for a Pi — or real KVM virtual machines on hardware that can take them.
Ollama and Open WebUI are one click, running entirely on your own hardware. No API key, no request leaving the house.
Plug in one ethernet cable. The box appears in Windows File Explorer and
at hmserver.local on Mac and Linux, with a Wi-Fi setup
portal as the fallback. No IP hunting, no companion app.
Standard TOTP, with the enrolment QR drawn on the box itself — the secret never leaves it, and enrolment works with no internet at all. Recovery codes included.
Getting at a box behind a home router is the part that normally does not work. Pick whichever of these suits you — you can run more than one, and none of them costs anything.
| You want | Use | It costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Just your own devices, minimal setup | Tailscale Serve | A Tailscale account |
| Public access, no domain, no router changes | Tailscale Funnel | A Tailscale account |
| Public access at a name you own | Custom domain | A domain, and ports 80/443 forwarded |
| The same, behind CGNAT | Cloudflare Tunnel | A domain on Cloudflare |
Tailscale Serve is the least work of the four: a real, publicly-trusted certificate on your tailnet name, with no domain, no ports and no browser warning. Only the dashboard is ever published by any of these — your apps stay on your network, behind the login.
Not yet possible, and worth being straight about rather than listing steps that stop halfway. Two things have to land first.
The build pipeline exists and produces a compressed image for the Raspberry Pi. Nothing has been published yet, because a release nobody has installed from is not a release.
The whole OS is one repository — dashboard, image recipes, helper scripts, tests — and it goes public under the Apache License 2.0 alongside the first release.
When both are done, installing is: flash the image, plug the box into your
router, and open hmserver.local. There is no account to make
and no password shipped — the first screen asks you to set one.
A missing capability found at the wrong moment is worse than one written down, so: