Control Center

Tipi gives you complete control of more than 100 applications and services. A mouse click is all it takes to install the apps.

- Ferdinand Thommes

To keep your data under your control, instead of outsourcing to unknown servers, the typical approach is to simply host the services yourself. It is becoming increasingly easy for less technically inclined users to operate a small home server. Not least, the Raspberry Pi has contributed significantly to this by encouraging many users to experiment. The choice of suitable hardware is naturally far greater: from devices such as laptops or PCs that have already been replaced by newer gear to virtual machines to rented VPS servers on the Internet.

To save you from having to package and configure every service as a container yourself, the number of home server managers have increased recently. Examples include DietPi, YunoHost, Mistborn, or NethServer. The summer of 2022 saw the release of another alternative in the form of Tipi [1] by Swiss developer Nicolas Meienberger [2].

Management Interface

Tipi is essentially a management interface for the applications and services that you want to run on your home server, without requiring in-depth expertise of the setup and management tasks for the home server operating system. Tipi currently offers more than 100 apps for installation in a click-and-forget process [3]. You don't have to worry about setting up the network or configuring the apps initially and can instead adjust the settings of each app later.

Tipi sets up four containers (Figure 1): The apps all end up in their own Docker containers. (You can try out a demo [4] on the Tipi GitHub page.)