About Self-Hosted and Companion Apps
selfh.st/apps and selfh.st/companions are curated directories of self-hosted and companion applications with tags, alternatives, platforms, and development details for easy discovery and browsing. The directories are populated by a database initially built for monitoring the applications and release details included in This Week in Self-Hosted.
Application logos and icons are sourced from the dashboard-icons project.
How often are the directories updated?
A set of custom Python scripts update the application details using the various git APIs and populate the lists with recently added applications every morning.
But Awesome-Selfhosted and AlternativeTo already exist?
The selfh.st directories should be considered supplemental and not direct replacements for existing resources. They were created as alternate views for discovering software using resources I had previously built for my own purposes while also organizing projects in way that feels a bit more intuitive and helpful for others.
Why does selfh.st/apps use tags and not categories?
The decision to use tags was intentional given the number of self-hosted projects that serve multiple purposes. It's easy to overlook projects after searching in the wrong category on other lists – tags should decrease the possibility of this happening on selfh.st/apps.
What is the criteria for adding an application to selfh.st/companions?
For discovery purposes, the criteria for adding an app to the companion list primarily focuses on two conditions:
- Listed applications should extend the functionality of a self-hosted project or assist with the management of self-hosted software
- Listed applications should not be a core service of the original project
While this does present a bit of a gray area, the ultimate goal of the project is to help users discover applications they might not have otherwise come across when deploying a self-hosted project.
How can I add my project to either list?
Feel free to reach out and share the details of your project with me.
Note that I will not manually intervene with the order in which your project is displayed. The current sort options (repository stars, last activity, alphabetical, recently added) are objective methods for displaying projects without personal bias.
What do the last activity date colors represent?
Each project's last activity date on selfh.st/apps has been color-coded based on the days since the project's latest commit as a way to differentiate between projects that are and aren't actively maintained.
The logic is loosely inspired by Awesome-Selfhosted:
- Green: Projects that have received a commit in the last 6 months
- Yellow: Projects that have received a commit in the last year
- Red: Projects that haven't received a commit in over a year
Why are some projects missing logos?
I'm not a graphic designer and have little interest in maintaining up-to-date assets for the 500+ projects on either list. As a result, I'm leveraging the dashboard-icons repository on GitHub to populate logos.
If you're a developer and interested in having your application's logo displayed, please work with the dashboard-icons team to have your assets added to the repository and reach out with the link when published.
Why publish your own release feeds?
You may have noticed each project on selfh.st/apps is assigned a custom release feed that can be used to receive updates via RSS. I rely on these feeds heavily for the updates I include in This Week in Self-Hosted, which I find necessary to use over GitHub's built-in feeds given they don't provide a method for excluding non-stable releases.
Behind the scenes, the Python update scripts referenced above retrieve the latest releases for each project and filter for stable releases using my own custom logic.
The feeds in selfh.st/apps are also a successor and replacement for the feeds previously released under the selfh.st/releases banner.