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Version: 2026.8.0

Security and privacy

The security story of a self-hosted instance is shaped by one fact: it runs on your machine, on your network, under your control. There is no vendor holding your data and no shared multi-customer database. That changes what you have to worry about and what you don't.

This section is the operator's view of it. Four pages, each answering a question you'd ask before trusting the thing with real data:

  • Secrets and keys: the two secrets the instance runs on, which one is irrecoverable, and how to hold them.
  • Accounts and access: roles, sessions, API tokens, and turning signup off.
  • Network exposure: what can leave the box, what's reachable from where, and the guard on outbound connections.
  • Your data: where it lives, that it's yours, and what the instance does not send anywhere.

The model in a paragraph​

  • Five containers on your own box: a database, the API, the web frontend, a nightly backup runner, and an HTTPS proxy when you enable it.
  • All data sits in a folder on that box.
  • A person gets in by logging in with an account you or they created, and what they can do is set by their role and the individual permissions you grant.
  • Automated clients (scripts, agents) use API tokens that are scoped to exactly what they need.
  • Outbound connections happen only for features you turn on, and each has an off switch. Nothing reports back to a central service.

What self-hosting does and doesn't cover​

  • It removes an entire class of risk: your data is never on someone else's server, so there's no third-party breach that can expose it and no account with a provider that can be compromised.
  • It hands you the parts a hosted service would handle: keeping the box patched, controlling who can reach it on your network, and holding the encryption key safely.

None of that is heavy for a home box. The pages here walk through each piece with the specific settings, so a household or a small group can run an instance soundly without a security background. The privacy summary is the short companion: exactly which features reach the internet and how to switch each off.