Self-hosted family calendar

Your family’s week, on the wall.

Hearth brings everyone’s calendars, chores, groceries and dinner plans together on a wall tablet, every phone and any browser. It runs on your own server, so there’s no subscription and no one else’s cloud.

$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JEwaldt27/hearth-calendar/main/install.sh | sudo bash

One command on Ubuntu or Debian. Installs Docker if needed, then asks two questions.

Hearth's wall display: a large clock, the weather, the week's events colour-coded by family member, tonight's dinner and today's chores with stars.

Hearth's wall display in dark mode: clock, weather, the family's week, meals and chores.

The wall display on a kitchen tablet. The Parkers are a demo family.

Everyone gets a colour

One calendar for the whole house, with each person easy to spot.

Give every family member a colour and an emoji. Their events, chores and stars wear it everywhere, and one tap shows just their day. Kids don’t need accounts or email addresses.

SamYoga · Team offsite · Book club

AlexGym · Dentist · Band practice

Maya, 8Piano · Soccer · 34 ⭐ saved up

Leo, 5Swim lesson · Picture day

What’s inside

Everything the fridge whiteboard did, and a lot it couldn’t.

Calendar

Plan the week together

Day, week, month and schedule views that anyone in the house can read at a glance.

Type “Soccer Tuesday 5pm” and it lands on Tuesday at 5
Drag events to a new day or time
Repeating events, with “this and following” edits
Countdowns, birthdays with ages, and public holidays

Hearth's week view in a browser, with the quick-add bar, countdown chips for the pumpkin patch and beach trip, and filters for each family member.

Two-way sync

Keep the calendars you already use

Link an account and its events show up in Hearth. Add or change something in Hearth and it’s written back, so it’s on your phone’s calendar too.

Google two-way Outlook & Microsoft 365 two-way iCloud two-way Fastmail, Nextcloud, CalDAV two-way School & team links subscribe

On every phone

A real app, with reminders

Add Hearth to your home screen on iPhone or Android for its own icon and full-screen window, then turn on reminders for that device.

Soccer practice in 30 minutesMaya · 5:00pm · Lincoln Park

3 chores still open tonightPractice piano, Brush teeth, Water the plants

Chores & rewards

Stars they can save up

Daily chores per person that reset overnight. Kids earn stars and spend them on rewards you set.

The Chores tab on a phone: each person's chores for today, with star balances and progress rings.

Lists

Groceries, shared live

Paste a whole list at once, tap to check off, and re-add your usuals in one go. See who added what.

A shared grocery list on a phone, with items to tap off and checked items crossed out.

Meals

Dinner, decided

Plan the week’s meals, reuse old favourites, and send the ingredients straight to the grocery list.

The meal planner on a phone, showing breakfast, lunch and dinner for each day of the week.

Wall display

Made for the old tablet in the drawer.

Open a display link on any tablet, monitor or Raspberry Pi and it becomes the family board. It stays awake, drifts back to today when nobody’s touching it, and needs no password on the device.

The wall display in dark mode on a landscape tablet.

The wall display on a tablet mounted in portrait, with the calendar on top and meals, chores and lists below.

Weather and up next

Today’s forecast beside the clock, and a card for whatever’s coming up in the next few hours.

Tap to tick off

Chores and grocery items check off right on the screen. Stars count up as the kids finish.

Night mode

Dims to a quiet clock on the hours you choose, so the kitchen isn’t lit up at midnight.

Photo frame

When no one’s using it, it becomes a slideshow of your family photos.

Portrait or landscape

Mount it either way. The layout rearranges itself when the screen turns.

Choose what shows

Pick which calendars and lists appear, and whether people can add events from the wall.

Yours, not rented

Your family’s schedule stays in your house.

Hearth runs in Docker on a home server, a Raspberry Pi or a small VPS. There’s no account with us, because there is no “us”.

No subscription: Free and open source under the MIT license. Read it, change it, share it.
Accounts for everyone: Each adult gets their own login and decides which calendars to share, and with whom.
Nightly backups: The database is backed up every night, and a script can copy the backups to your PC.
Looks after itself: A health page for admins, plus an email or push alert if backups stop, sync breaks or the disk fills up.
Private by design: Linked-account passwords and tokens are encrypted. Wall displays use revocable links, not passwords.

Install

Up and running in about five minutes.

Run one command

On a Linux machine that’s always on, paste the install command below. It sets up Docker, generates the secrets and downloads Hearth.

Answer two questions

Home network only, your own domain with HTTPS, or a Cloudflare Tunnel? And which time zone is home?

Create your account

Open the address it prints, for example http://192.168.1.50:8080. The first account becomes the admin.

$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JEwaldt27/hearth-calendar/main/install.sh | sudo bash

Ubuntu 22.04+ or Debian 12 PC, server or Raspberry Pi 4/5 1 GB of memory is plenty Run it again to update

Questions

Good to know

Something else? Ask on GitHub.

What do I need for the wall display?

Any screen with a modern web browser. An older iPad or Android tablet works well, and so does a monitor with a Raspberry Pi. The display does very little work, so a secondhand tablet is plenty. Create a display link in Settings and open it on the device.

Do I need a domain name?

No. Hearth works on your home network straight away. For use away from home, installing it as a phone app, push reminders, and linking Google or Outlook, you’ll want HTTPS. The installer can set that up with your own domain or a free Cloudflare Tunnel.

Which calendars can I connect?

Google, Outlook.com and Microsoft 365, iCloud, Fastmail, Nextcloud and any other CalDAV server sync both ways. School, sports and team calendars can be added from their subscribe links, and holiday calendars from a list of countries.

Does my data go anywhere?

Your events, lists and photos stay on your server. Hearth only talks to the services you connect (like Google or Outlook), your own email provider if you set one up, and Open-Meteo for the weather, which only receives your town’s location.

How do updates work?

Run the install command again. It keeps your settings and data, downloads the newest version and restarts. Each update is built automatically from the open-source code on GitHub.

Can the kids use it without accounts?

Yes. Family members are just names with a colour and emoji. Kids can tick off chores and see their stars on the wall display, and grown-ups manage everything from their own accounts.

Put the whole family on one page.

Install Hearth View the code on GitHub