№ 01 Invocation

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.

Download for macOS v0.1.0 · 28 MB · macOS 26+ Read the docs →

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

№ 02 The principle

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 Eight services. One Mac Mini.

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 In three steps

Setup takes about fifteen minutes.

  1. 01

    Run the installer

    Double-click Rainbow.pkg. It installs Apple Container, pulls the container images, and installs 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 The whole system

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 PaperMC also run as Apple containers. 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 Get Rainbow

It’s yours. Take it.

Version 0.1.0
Size 364 KB
Requires macOS 26 · Apple Silicon
Recommended 16 GB RAM, 512 GB storage
Download Rainbow .pkg · macOS View source on GitHub → All releases →
Checksums & signatures
SHA-256
542e6e190d8e2cfada1bbe816a129dc12d3649cfa4510e5e84882a359567f31e
Verify
shasum -a 256 -c Rainbow.pkg.sha256
Signed by
Developer ID Installer: Aubrey Anderson (HUF486AJ92) · Notarized by Apple