I’ve been after a self-hosted home asset inventory app for ages, but there just doesn’t seem to be much out there. There are plenty of business options for tracking an organisations assets, or stock inventory, but nothing in the way of home asset tracking.
There are a number of paid-for software solutions (Asset Panda, Asset cloud, etc.) but none of them really offer what I wanted for a home asset management solution – plus, they are paid-for apps, that’s not what I’m looking for either.
Homebox, meets most of my requirements – it’s free, it’s self-hosted, and, since the update – allows you to host images of the asset inline with the detail – something that always bugged me about previous versions – the images were always hidden away, and opened in a new tab hen you wanted to view them.
I’ve been running Homebox for a while on my Raspberry Pi, but only just deployed it on my Nuc, so at the moment I have no recorded assets. Homebox exports data as a .csv file so it’s a fairly straightforward process to export / import from one to the other.
Setting Homebox up is really easy – the docker compose file is pretty small and only needs two items to be configured – One is the path where Homepage will store its data, and the other is an entry (or some entries) in the HOMEPAGE_ALLOWED_HOSTS environment variable to restrict how the service can be accessed.
Once up and running, one of the first tings you’ll most likely do is configure the locations of where your assets are stored.
Additionally, you will need to create a set of labels for the assets you want to track.
Once you are setup, you can start to enter the asset details.
For insurance purposes, having an asset manager is a really good Idea – If anything gets broken, or lost and you need to make a claim against your policy – this can be a really good thing to have.