Cloud in a Bottle

Cloud in a Bottle is an open-source personal cloud platform from Imbue that turns a server you control into a place to deploy, use, and share web apps. A web dashboard and a companion CLI install apps from Git repositories, and each app runs in a rootless Podman container on its own HTTPS subdomain. The goal is to make self-hosting feel like installing apps on a phone: open the catalog, click install, and the app is live at your own domain.

Under the hood, a Python router acts as the control plane: it reads each app's cloudinabottle.toml manifest, builds its Dockerfile with rootless Podman, and proxies HTTP and WebSocket traffic per app subdomain, with Caddy handling HTTPS and CoreDNS serving wildcard DNS. New instances ship with preinstalled apps including a catalog, an encrypted restic-based backup app, a file browser, secrets storage, an OAuth provider, and a preconfigured Matrix chat server. Apps are sandboxed by default — their own data directories, no extra Linux capabilities, and one port on loopback — and every route requires owner authentication unless the manifest explicitly declares public paths.

Compared with paid platforms like Heroku, Render, Railway, and Fly.io, the difference is who owns the infrastructure. Your apps and data stay on hardware you control, with no per-service pricing or resource quotas — everything runs on one machine, whether that is a cloud server, a dedicated home server, or a shared home machine. If you would rather not manage hardware at all, Imbue offers paid managed hosting that provisions a dedicated space for you and hands it over on your own SSH key, so you can still walk away with it.