Deploying on a dedicated home server

Use this path when you have a machine at home that can just run Cloud in a Bottle: a spare desktop, a raspberry pi, an old laptop.

Cloud in a Bottle installs directly on the host. It runs various system services, sets system-level configuration, and expects to be able to manage the system ongoing. If you don't want to give it the whole machine, install into a VM instead. If the machine is a VPS or cloud server rather than something on your home network, deploy on a cloud instance instead.

Prerequisites

• Ubuntu 24.04 on the target machine, freshly installed.
• SSH access as root, or as a user with sudo.
• A root filesystem supporting idmapped mounts (ext4, xfs, or btrfs). Install fails early with a clear error if it does not.

Part 1: core instance setup

1. Install

SSH to the machine as root and run:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cloud-in-a-bottle/cloud-in-a-bottle/main/scripts/provision.sh \
  | sudo bash -s -- --domain lvh.me:8080 --local-http-only --open-claim

The script:

1. creates an unprivileged host user and copies root's authorized_keys to it,
2. installs system packages, rootless Podman, and pixi,
3. clones Cloud in a Bottle to /home/host/openhost (openhost is the old name of this project),
4. writes config to /home/host/.openhost/local_compute_space/,
5. installs and starts the openhost systemd service.

2. Reach the dashboard

Port 8080 is bound to loopback, so tunnel to it over SSH:

ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 host@<machine-ip>

Then open http://lvh.me:8080 and setup your instance!

lvh.me is a public DNS name that simply resolves to 127.0.0.1. Similar to localhost, but subdomains (mycoolapp.lvh.me) also resolve properly.

You'll need to have that SSH tunnel active to access your instance until you take it public.

Debug / Manage / Upgrade

sudo systemctl status openhost
sudo journalctl -u openhost -f

The service runs as the unprivileged host user, with code at /home/host/openhost and config and data under /home/host/.openhost/local_compute_space/. Upgrades are a button on the dashboard's settings page. If you want to poke around further, see Debugging and The bottle CLI.

Part 2: taking it public

Follow Exposing a home server for a typical home ISP connection, or Exposing a server with a static IP if you have a static IP.