RainaOS: A Self-Hosted Operating System for the Family

Family life fragments across a dozen apps, calendars, and switches. RainaOS pulls it into a single private system that doesn't just store information; it acts on it: planning ahead, sending the right reminder to the right phone, and quietly handling the lights and fans nobody's using.

It's modeled on how a company runs on Salesforce, re-pointed at a household: one central system of record that tracks every person, plan, and task, then automates the busywork. In the design, a Postgres data model holds the "objects" (people, events, tasks, devices), and an event-driven brain plans and acts on them.

Everything runs on hardware at home. No cloud landlord, no third-party servers seeing inside the house, and if the outside world falls over, the home keeps working. This is a clean, ground-up rebuild, keeping only the RainaOS name from an earlier smart-home experiment.

One source of truth

People, plans, tasks, and the house itself, in one private record the whole family can trust, not another app to check.

It acts on its own

An event-driven automation brain (Inngest): reminders pushed to phones, lights and fans handled automatically, plans made before anyone asks.

Three ways in

A private per-member login, a shared household view, and glanceable wall-screen kiosks on repurposed tablets, each suited to how it's used.

Local-first & private

Self-hosted on home hardware with Postgres row-level security; data never leaves the house unless asked, and it works even when the internet doesn't.

Smart-home layer

Designed around Home Assistant as the effector for lights, fans, and sensors: local control over Zigbee and Matter, no cloud round-trip.

Built to extend

Adding a table is adding a new kind of household object, exactly like Salesforce custom objects, maximally extensible as the family's needs grow.

Working today. A prototype daily-briefing app runs on a Mac: a morning "Today" screen and an evening "Wind down" screen on a shared design system. Its data layer is already shaped like Home Assistant, behind a thin state-and-service shim currently backed by a local mock, so pointing it at a real hub means swapping the inside of the shim and nothing else. The architecture below is being built one slice at a time, cheapest high-impact wins first.

Vision & planning Defining what we're building, the data model, and why. Front-loaded so the rest is cheap to build. In progress

The software The app, the three views, and the automation brain. Prototyping on a laptop, with no new hardware needed to begin. Designing

Security & privacy One passkey login for all, network kept in safe lanes, everything backed up. Strong, but never in the way. Designing

Home network Rock-solid internet in every room, the foundation everything else sits on. Up next

The home server The always-on machine that runs it all, day and night. A candidate is already on hand. Shortlisted

Smart home Devices that work locally, off the internet, chosen carefully to avoid buying gear we'd only rip out later. Planning