Open source
No black boxes. Read every line.
Watchtower is MIT-licensed and assembled entirely from open-source software. Nothing here is proprietary, nothing phones home, and nothing can be taken away from you by a company decision. It's yours to inspect, run, fork and change.
The rules it lives by
Open source isn't a label here — it's the constraint.
No SaaS dependencies
Every component is open source and self-hostable. If a piece can't run on your own hardware, it doesn't get in.
Proven over novel
Battle-tested tools that already run the internet — not shiny alpha reimplementations. Boring is a feature.
Reproducible & documented
Declarative and idempotent: a README per role, a written design before anything non-trivial is built. If it isn't captured, it didn't happen.
Licenses vetted
OSI-approved and self-hostable only. Source-available relicenses (BSL) are rejected on principle — freedom now shouldn't become a bill later.
Assembled from
Standing on the shoulders of proven software.
Watchtower doesn't reinvent the hard parts — it wires together the best open-source tools for each job, with the licenses vetted and recorded. Swap a piece and the rest keeps working: the interfaces between them are deliberately thin.
- ✦ Docker Swarmorchestration
- ✦ PostgreSQL · PatroniHA database
- ✦ etcdcoordination
- ✦ WireGuard · Rosenpasspost-quantum mesh
- ✦ NetBirdpeer overlay VPN
- ✦ Caddy / Traefikfront door
- ✦ Authentiksign-in & MFA
- ✦ Ansiblethe blueprint
- ✦ Grafana · Loki · Prometheusmonitoring
- ✦ CrowdSec · Falco · Trivydefense
- ✦ OpenBaosecrets & keys
- ✦ SeaweedFSencrypted storage
Make it yours
Fork it, strip it to the two apps you actually want, or grow it into something bigger. It's MIT-licensed for exactly that reason: the point isn't to run this cloud — it's to run your cloud. The reasoning behind every decision is written down so you can disagree with it on purpose.
Stop renting your digital life.
Own your cloud.
Watchtower is an open blueprint — not a product for sale. Everything you've read here is on GitLab, ready to read, run and make your own.