Getting started.

NoCloud is self-hosted and local-first — it runs on hardware you own, not ours.

What you'll need

A Mac

Where the pipeline digests your exports and holds the one database. The heavy lifting runs here.

A Raspberry Pi

The always-on server: it hosts the web app and your photos (via Immich), reachable only over your VPN.

Your own VPN

WireGuard, self-hosted. Nothing of yours is exposed to the internet — you reach your NoCloud from anywhere, privately.

The shape of it

  1. Bring your past. Point NoCloud at a Google Takeout, two decades of email, a folder of unsorted photos, a pile of bank statements.
  2. Digest it once, reversibly. The pipeline normalises everything into one queryable database you own. Every bulk change ships an undo; nothing is deleted without confirmation.
  3. Live in it. The Pi serves a private web app — photos, finances, family, health — over your VPN. On top of Immich and Home Assistant, not instead of them.

Install

One line, no package manager required. It downloads the nocloudme CLI, then the CLI clones the rest of the product and sets up its own environment:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin && curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NoCloudLife/nocloud-core/main/bin/nocloudme -o ~/.local/bin/nocloudme && chmod +x ~/.local/bin/nocloudme && ~/.local/bin/nocloudme init

Make sure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH. A Homebrew formula also ships in the repo, for whenever there's a tagged release to point it at.