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HN: HomeBrain – Your private local cloud, agent wired into everything

HomeBrain, a new open-source appliance from developer oalterg, combines Nextcloud, Home Assistant, Vaultwarden, and a local AI agent into a single private cloud device with no subscriptions or cloud accounts. The system, which runs on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Raspberry Pi OS, features a master password and recovery phrase, encrypted off-site backups, and a GPU-powered agent that operates via Telegram, with hardware requirements starting at a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB RAM for the HomeCloud variant.

read4 min views1 publishedAug 16, 2026
HN: HomeBrain – Your private local cloud, agent wired into everything
Image: Michielbdejong (auto-discovered)

Your private local cloud, agent wired into everything.

Nextcloud, Home Assistant, Vaultwarden, and a local AI agent are four products. HomeBrain is the appliance that makes them one: a single password, a backup that restores the whole box, updates that will not brick you, and — on a GPU — an agent that operates it so you never need a shell.

No subscriptions. No cloud accounts. No one else's servers.

A browser wizard configures it. Nothing leaves the box.

Solarized Light, with a dark theme a click away. The dashboard loads nothing from the internet — no CDN, no web fonts, no analytics — so it renders identically on a box with the WAN unplugged.

A GPU runs the agent. Without one, the same install is HomeCloud: files, home, vault. ARM or x86_64.

One secret, one recovery— dashboard, files, smart home, and backup encryption share a master password. A recovery phrase, shown once, resets the lot.An agent that acts— calendar, lights, files, email. Every token stays on your GPU.** Backup that restores the composition**— not four separate dumps. Scheduled, encrypted, off-site, one click from the dashboard.** It runs itself**— pinned versions, downgrades blocked, a factory reset back to the wizard. Health alerts while the box is up.

On the LAN, open http://<server-ip>

. Nextcloud and Vault also speak HTTPS on local ports.

With a GPU, Telegram is the daily interface: no VPN, no extra app. Pair it after setup. A public tunnel is optional, if you want the web UIs from outside.

Without a GPU, a Pangolin tunnel is how you reach the browser from outside.

One domain in, three subdomains out — no port forwarding and no inbound firewall rule. The same screen moves the box to a Cloudflare Tunnel, or reverts every field to what the device shipped with.

Dim the living room. Fetch the latest invoice from Nextcloud. Each integration is one row: connect it, test it, revoke it. The agent talks to every service from there. More than one account per service is fine — two homes, two Nextcloud users, several mailboxes.

Below the integrations sits the other half: the messenger the agent answers on. Pairing is a code, not a port.

Download a model, switch to it, delete the ones you are not using. The previous model stays on disk, so switching back is instant. Weights are fetched once, from the dashboard — never at inference time.

A schedule, a drive, and somewhere off-site — the whole backup story is one tab. Archives are encrypted with your master password before they leave the box, so the target never sees your data. WebDAV, SFTP or S3 — or a second HomeBrain, which hands out a dedicated replica account for exactly this.

Nextcloud          Docker     Files, calendars, contacts
Home Assistant     Docker     Smart-home automation
Vaultwarden        Docker     Password manager (Bitwarden-compatible)
MariaDB            Docker     Nextcloud + Vault database
Pangolin Newt      Docker     Encrypted tunnel            optional
llama-server       systemd    Local LLM inference         GPU only
whisper-server     systemd    Speech-to-text              GPU only
OpenClaw           systemd    AI agent on Telegram        GPU only

Versions are pinned and updated from the dashboard in one click.

HomeBrain HomeCloud
CPU AMD Ryzen 5 / Intel i5 or better Raspberry Pi 5
RAM 32 GB 8 GB
Storage 512 GB NVMe SSD
GPU AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT (16 GB VRAM)
OS Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Raspberry Pi OS Trixie 64-bit

Inference is Vulkan via Mesa RADV — no ROCm. Throughput and tuning: BENCHMARKS.md.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oalterg/HomeBrain/main/install | sudo bash
sudo /opt/homebrain/scripts/provision.sh

Open http://<server-ip>

, log in, and initialize. Local network is the default. The wizard shows the generated master password and recovery phrase once. (Restoring from backup reuses the old master password instead of generating one.)

provision.sh

prepares the host and starts the manager. It prints a factory password once if you did not pass --factory-pass

; that password opens the wizard and is stored in factory_config.txt

(mode 600). On AMD GPU hardware a reboot is recommended so kernel parameters take effect; it is not required to open the wizard.

Tunnel credentials at provision time are stored on the box and selected in the wizard — they do not skip it. On an already-set-up box the same command repoints the live tunnel without wiping data. Flags and the Pangolin resource map: PANGOLIN.md.

Doc What's in it

DISASTER_RECOVERY.mdPANGOLIN.mdROADMAP.mdPRODUCT_REVIEW_2026-08.mdBSD-3-Clause — see LICENSE.

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