Guides

FAQ

Hardware, privacy, where your data lives, and what to do when you are locked out.

What hardware do I need?

Any x86-64 or ARM64 machine running Debian or Ubuntu. A mini PC with 8 GB of memory runs a comfortable set of apps; photo recognition, transcoding and local AI want more. Each app page lists roughly how much memory the app uses.

Does HomeBox send anything about me anywhere?

No account, and nothing about you, your files or the apps you run. HomeBox does make two kinds of request on its own: it checks for a new HomeBox release, and it asks container registries whether your apps have updates. Apps you install may contact their own services, as they would anywhere.

Two things are counted, anonymously, so the project knows whether a release reached anyone: each run of the install script adds one to a daily count per country, and the release check sends the HomeBox version your box is on. Neither stores an IP address or anything that identifies you or your box — a running box is recognised for one day only, by a salted hash that cannot be followed to the next day, and those rows are reduced to plain per-version totals within two days. The code is in infra/get-worker.

To opt out, add HB_ANONYMOUS_STATS=off to /opt/homebox/.env and run sudo homebox up dashboard --yes. The box then checks GitHub directly.

Is it free?

Yes. HomeBox is open source, and every app in the catalog is the real upstream project.

Where is my data?

• App settings and databases: /opt/homebox/modules/<app>/config
• Generated passwords: /opt/homebox/.env
• Shared files, media and downloads: the data pool, /opt/homebox/data by default

Can my media live on a NAS?

Yes. Point the media folder at a NAS mount and the media apps, File Browser and the rest read and write there. Uninstalling HomeBox never touches storage outside /opt/homebox.

I forgot the dashboard password.

Remove the account and claim the box again from a terminal on it:

sudo rm /opt/homebox/state/auth.json
homebox bootstrap-token

Too many wrong attempts lock sign-in for fifteen minutes. To clear that immediately:

homebox unlock

Can I run it on a VPS?

Yes. Media apps and anything that downloads are better at home, on your own connection and disks; password managers, bookmarks, monitoring and chat are fine on a small VPS.

How do I see every command?

homebox help