Karakeep Hosting: Save Links, Notes and Pages on Your Own Server

Karakeep (formerly Hoarder) is an open-source (AGPL-3.0) place to keep links, notes and images and find them again. Choose it with a plan, pay, and we build the VPS (KVM, NVMe, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) and install it in about seven minutes after boot, most of it building the browser it uses. You get:

• Karakeep 0.34 with Meilisearch for search and a headless browser that fetches the pages you save.
• Open-source Chromium as that browser, built on your server from Debian's package, rather than the proprietary Google Chrome in Karakeep's own image.
• An HTTPS address like bookmarks-k3x9q2.devoster.app with a Let's Encrypt certificate, which the extensions and apps connect to.
• Your admin account already created. In Karakeep the first person to sign up becomes admin; here that is done on the server before the site goes public, and sign-ups are then closed. You log in with your account email and a generated password shown in the Devoster dashboard, where you can also reset it.
• Dashboard controls to open the app, restart, stop or start it, read its logs, run an update and connect your own domain.

The app is free; you pay only the VPS plan, with 10% off yearly. The server comes with full root, free nightly backups kept 3 days plus one snapshot, a dedicated IPv4, 1 Gbps with unlimited bandwidth and DDoS protection. Already have a Devoster VPS? You can install Karakeep on it from VPS Control, after the panel checks the OS, free ports 80/443 and disk, or reinstall the server with it, at no charge. Other apps that install this way are on the One-Click Apps page.

• From the browser: Karakeep's extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari save the page you are on in one click.
• From your phone: its iOS and Android apps, and the share sheet, save links on the go. They connect with your HTTPS address and your email and password.
• Notes, images and PDFs can be saved alongside links.
• Organise: tags, lists (which you can share with other users) and highlights on saved pages.
• Search: full-text search covers the text of every saved page, not just titles.
• Bring your old bookmarks: Karakeep imports a browser bookmarks export and exports from services such as Pocket, Omnivore and Linkwarden. It can also save new items from RSS feeds automatically.

When you save a link, Karakeep opens it in a real Chromium browser on your server, so it can read pages that need JavaScript. By default it keeps the page's readable text and a screenshot, which keeps the content even if the page later changes or disappears. Full-page archives (a complete local copy of each page) and video downloads can be switched on too, at a much higher cost in disk.

That browser, plus the search index and the app, is why Karakeep needs more memory than a typical bookmark app. Each page being fetched is a browser tab of roughly 100 to 300 MB.

You can upgrade from the panel later, but plans are not shrunk in place.

Karakeep can tag and summarise what you save with a language model. That is off at install, because it needs a key we don't provide, and with no key nothing is sent anywhere. To turn it on, add your settings over SSH to /opt/devoster/data/karakeep/custom.env, a file updates never overwrite:

• OPENAI_API_KEY=... for OpenAI, optionally with OPENAI_BASE_URL for another OpenAI-compatible provider and INFERENCE_TEXT_MODEL / INFERENCE_IMAGE_MODEL to pick models;
• or OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://your-ollama-host:11434 for an Ollama server you run.

Then apply it from /opt/devoster/app with docker compose -p devoster-app up -d --force-recreate web. The same file takes Karakeep's other settings, such as CRAWLER_FULL_PAGE_ARCHIVE=true for full-page archives. With a cloud provider, the text of what you save is sent to that provider and its usage is billed to your account there.

Accounts: sign-ups are closed. As admin you add people under Admin settings, Users, with a password you set; no email is involved, which matters because outbound mail ports are blocked by default on Devoster VPS plans. Your own password is reset from the Devoster dashboard, which also ends that account's signed-in web sessions.

Backups: nightly backups (kept 3 days) and your snapshot slot cover the whole VPS. Karakeep can also export your bookmarks, and the data lives in /opt/devoster/data/karakeep if you want your own copies over SFTP.

Updates: we check new Karakeep versions, and refresh the Chromium build for security fixes, and apply them in a maintenance hour you choose, or when you press Update now. A snapshot of the VPS is taken first, and if Karakeep doesn't come back healthy the server is rolled back automatically.

The server is unmanaged: you have full root, and its security is your responsibility. Our VPS hardening checklist is a good hour's read.