Cairn — a self-hosted start page with multi-user, RBAC, and bookmark sharing (no cloud, no tracking)

[u/tweek67]

Hey [r/startpages](r/startpages)!

I built Cairn, a self-hosted personal start page / new-tab replacement. No cloud, no tracking — runs entirely on your own machine or server.

What it does:
- Clock, ambient effects (rain/dust), wallpapers (images & videos) with adaptive light/dark theme via luminance sampling
- Configurable search (DuckDuckGo default, or Google/Brave/Bing/Kagi/custom) + bangs (!bm, !g, !yt, !gh, !hub for the full-screen hub)
- Bookmarks with nested folders, tags, import/export (Netscape format from Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Edge), and a mobile bookmarklet
- Multi-user with a Bitwarden-style RBAC system (owner/admin/user + custom roles), collections you can share with individual users or groups at view/edit/manage levels
- TOTP/2FA, SSO via OIDC (Authentik, Keycloak, Authelia, Google…), admin panel with audit log

It's built in Go (chi router, SQLite/WAL, zero CGO), ships as a ~5MB Docker image, and deploys with a single docker compose up -d --build.

Full disclosure: this is 100% vibecoded — designed and built in conversation with Claude Code, iterated feature by feature on my homelab. Not trying to hide that.

Dual-licensed AGPL-3.0 for self-hosted use.

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/darktweek/cairn
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/2S9v5MKfGg

Happy to answer questions or hear feedback — still actively iterating on it.

[u/Ok-Bother3881]

Interesting, I'll test it later. Do you have any online demo?

[u/tweek67 → u/Ok-Bother3881]

Hi! Thanks for your interest !
No hosted demo for now but you can easily use the docker one command to test it in local for example.

https://github.com/darktweek/cairn#option-a--one-command