№ 01

Take back  your digital life

Rainbow turns a Mac Mini into your personal cloud. Email, photos, files, documents, media, even a Minecraft server — all on hardware you own.

No subscriptions. No surveillance. No open ports. Just your data, on your machine, accessible everywhere you go.

Free & open source · Apache 2.0 · Made for Apple Silicon

№ 02

You shouldn’t have to rent your own life back from the people selling it hoarding it.

— The Rainbow project

The problem

Your photos, your email, your documents — all on someone else’s computer. Indexed, mined, monetized. One outage and they’re gone. One policy change and they’re hostage.

The cloud was supposed to be liberation. It became dependence.

The answer

A Mac Mini sits on a shelf. Eight rock-solid open-source services run on it. A small encrypted tunnel connects them to the world. That’s the whole architecture.

It costs you a one-time hardware purchase and zero recurring subscriptions.

№ 03

A complete digital life, indexed.

  1. i.

    Photos & videos

    Self-hosted Google Photos, with AI search, face recognition, and mobile auto-upload.

    Immich →
  2. ii.

    Email, calendar, contacts

    A real mail server. IMAP, SMTP, JMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV — all the protocols, none of the tracking.

    Stalwart →
  3. iii.

    Collaborative documents

    Docs, spreadsheets, kanban boards, whiteboards. End-to-end encrypted by default.

    CryptPad →
  4. iv.

    File sync & share

    Block-level sync across all your devices. Your Dropbox, but it’s actually yours.

    Seafile →
  5. v.

    Media server

    Your movies and music, streamed anywhere. Hardware-accelerated 4K transcoding via Apple Metal.

    Jellyfin →
  6. vi.

    Identity & SSO

    One login for everything. OAuth2 for the family, friends, the kids’ accounts.

    Authentik →
  7. vii.

    Minecraft server

    Because the kids will ask. Paper server, optimized for Apple Silicon.

    Paper →
  8. viii.

    AI app builder

    Describe an app to Claude, deploy it on your own server. Family invites, recipe sites, link-in-bios.

    Claude API →
№ 04

Setup takes about fifteen minutes.

  1. 01

    Run the installer

    Double-click Rainbow.pkg. It installs Apple Container, the native services, and the CLI. A setup wizard walks you through everything.

  2. 02

    Pick your domain

    Claim a free yourname.rainbow.rocks subdomain — or bring your own. Cloudflare handles DNS, certificates, and a tunnel so you don’t open any ports.

  3. 03

    Use it.

    Photos sync from your phone. Mail flows. Files share. Media streams. Backups run nightly and encrypt before they leave the house.

№ 05

How the pieces fit together.

Rainbow system architecture External traffic flows from the internet through Cloudflare's edge into an outbound-only tunnel, lands at Caddy, and is routed to one of five services: Immich, Stalwart, CryptPad, Seafile, or Authentik. Those services share a Postgres database and a Valkey cache, both of which sit on the user's local disk. Restic backs up the data, encrypted, to off-site S3-compatible storage. — THE OUTSIDE WORLD — Cloudflare edge DNS · TLS · global routing outbound tunnel only — no open ports on your router. Caddy reverse proxy Immich photos Stalwart email CryptPad documents Seafile files Authentik auth + Jellyfin and Paper run alongside, native to macOS. Postgres shared database Valkey cache on your disk — your house, your data. Restic S3 offsite encrypted backup encrypted before it leaves — you hold the key. FIG. № 1 RAINBOW SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
Every external request enters through Cloudflare and rides an outbound-only tunnel to your machine. Data lives on your disk. Backups encrypt before they leave the house — and the key stays with you.
№ 06

It’s yours. Take it.

Version 0.1.0
Size 28 MB
Requires macOS 26 · Apple Silicon
Recommended 16 GB RAM, 512 GB storage
Checksums & signatures
SHA-256
a1b2c3d4e5f6...verify after release
Signed by
Apple Developer ID · Notarized