this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Homebox is the inventory and organization system built for the Home User! With a focus on simplicity and ease of use, Homebox is the perfect solution for your home inventory, organization, and management needs. While developing this project I've tried to keep the following principles in mind:

Simple - Homebox is designed to be simple and easy to use. No complicated setup or configuration required. Use either a single docker container, or deploy yourself by compiling the binary for your platform of choice. Blazingly

Fast - Homebox is written in Go which makes it extremely fast and requires minimal resources to deploy. In general idle memory usage is less than 50MB for the whole container.

Portable - Homebox is designed to be portable and run on anywhere. We use SQLite and an embedded Web UI to make it easy to deploy, use, and backup.

(I am not affiliated with this project)

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[–] EncryptKeeper 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Homebox is an inventory management system in the same vein as Snipe-IT, but purpose built to be simpler and cause less friction so that you’re more inclined to enter things and keep them up to date. You can use it for things like storing user guides, warranty contracts and expirations, and even expense tracking related to the maintenance and repair of any home items, like appliances and electronics. I use it to store warranty expirations for things like game consoles and TVs, as well as remind me to order new air filters for the home.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I set up dokuwiki for that the other day. Thanks for posting this, I’ll have to check it out

[–] noja 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Homebox is fundamentally different from docuwiki. Hyper focused on “where do o find ‘x’” and really great for that purpose! I especially like that when you add an item like a furnace there is a maintenance log option. Pretty sweet

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That sounds awesome. Does it have maintenance reminders and consumable part descriptions/part numbers? I can never remember different filters I need for various things (water, fridge, furnace, cars, etc).

[–] EncryptKeeper 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Yes you can schedule and record maintenance logs. For my air filter I just threw the model number for the filters in the description or a custom field, as I don’t plan on keeping an inventory of filters for it, though you could in theory add an item for the consumable parts and make their parent item be the thing they go in. You could then define in the item for those consumable parts, the place in your house where you store them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Sounds a lot like Netbox, for network management. You can define data centers and racks and equipment and sub equipment as well as the actual network information like what cable is plugged into which port on which device, VLANs, IP addresses, subnets, BPG ASNs, etc.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

So, I used Homebox for a few days now. I like the simplicity of it and I like the direction they're going. However, there are quite a few bugs and data loss issues, it's not ready for production yet. The thing is, these issues should be so easy to fix (it's a simple CRUD app) that it makes me doubt the dev skills and possibility of other issues I haven't discovered yet.

  • The purchase date just increments or decrements by one day after editing an item
  • When editing an item the notes/description fields show the data from the previously edited item, causing you to overwrite data

These two issues alone made me go back to my spreadsheet for now (good thing I kept a backup). I simply don't trust the app to keep my data intact.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Thanks for your feedback! I was going to try this out but your comment makes me want to give them some more time. Ive been waiting for a long time so I don't mind giving it some more time to cook.

At the moment I'm in the middle of mixing Netbox and snipeit, so maybe by the time I get frustrated with both of them, homebox will be in a better state.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Hello, I just saw this post as I stumbled upon Homebox recently and thought about searching for it on Lemmy......so I'm sorry for posting this late. Which version of Homebox did you try? Did you try again with newer version? As I'm looking forward for a simple database for home inventory, I'm just curious how it ended and what are you using today! Thank you very much!

[–] vegetaaaaaaa 8 points 11 months ago

Unfortunate name collision with another project related to self-hosting: https://github.com/progmaticltd/homebox

The website could use one or two screenshots of important features without having to login to the demo.

Painting the window is noticeably slow (Firefox ESR 102), have you tested it with Firefox?

Other than that, well done! It looks good and well maintained. I wanted to evaluate Snipe-IT someday, maybe I will also give this a try

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

This looks amazing. I've been looking for a replacement for Delicious Library for a long time and this looks like exactly what I've been looking for.

[–] SoleInvictus 3 points 11 months ago

This is super cool! The giant OCD nerd inside is going to go nuts while cataloging my entire home.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Yeah this is right up my alley. Can't wait to install this and document everything.

I am very paranoid about security, so is there a reason you deter people from using this application in a Docker container per your website?

[–] EncryptKeeper 3 points 11 months ago

Sorry friend, this isn’t my project I’m just sharing it. That being said I totally run this in a docker container.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I checked the quick start, that aren't deterring people from using Docker, they're saying you shouldn't use the Docker CLI to launch it, and instead use docker-compose. Which is fair, compose is a much better format for persistent containers and being able to use l easily manage and migrate them.

[–] VelociCatTurd 2 points 11 months ago

Dude, this is sick AF. I deployed snipe IT and found it was just too much. I can’t wait to try this out!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Not sure if it is inside the scope of the project, but does it also have an API?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Put this on my list of projects to dig into when I have time. I briefly tried Grocy a while back thinking I may be able to use it for inventory mgmt, but it didn't stick. I want to say I found some other self hosted home inventory project at one point but didn't stick with that one either. It's one of those things that I think you have to really invest in to get ROI back, but that's hard to do, especially when it's more than just yourself (wife-factor) planning to utilize it that also has to buy-in and commit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Seems like such a great idea until you have to maintain it, yeah.

There's probably been a home inventory spreadsheet on every hard drive I've ever owned and not a single one was in a useful state.

[–] rambos 1 points 11 months ago

Thx for sharing!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

This sounds so cool

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

it's so pretty, i'm going to install this RN

[–] EncryptKeeper 1 points 11 months ago

It actually has some really nice built in themes.

[–] joe 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Seems neat. I wish there were a way to add custom fields; I would totally use this to keep track of my liquor cabinet contents. (I use a spreadsheet for this now.)

I know it's not the general use case this though, but that didn't keep me from getting my hopes up haha.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You might be in luck, I see this under optional settings for items:

Arbitrary/Custom Fields

[–] joe 0 points 11 months ago

Apparently I didn't dig deep enough! Thanks a lot for the heads up.

[–] petrsimek1712 0 points 11 months ago