penpapertech/bothy repository overview

⁠Bothy hub

An offline library for everyone on your Wi-Fi. Run it on a spare computer, a mini PC or a Raspberry Pi, and any phone or laptop on the same Wi-Fi can use it in a browser. No internet is needed once it's downloaded. It's useful in a power or internet outage, at a campsite, or anywhere the internet is slow or gone.

What it holds:

• 440,000 articles: 131,000 Wikipedia articles chosen for survival and everyday knowledge, wikiHow, iFixit repair guides, Appropedia, practical Q&A, and survival guides
• Search by meaning, not just keywords ("my car won't start in the cold"), plus optional AI answers written from the library
• First aid cards
• Street maps with place search, country by country (about 500 regions)
• Books: up to 54,000 Project Gutenberg books, read in the browser
• Chat for everyone on the Wi-Fi, with photos, voice messages and places
• Games, and downloads for phones: the Bothy Android app copies content from the hub

It's free, has no ads and no accounts, and it doesn't track anyone. The full guide is at https://pocketbothy.com/hub⁠.

⁠Start it

Install Docker (Docker Desktop⁠ on Windows or Mac; curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh on Linux or a Raspberry Pi), then run:

docker run -d --name bothy --restart unless-stopped -p 8080:8080 -p 8443:8443 -v bothy-data:/data -e BOTHY_PRESET=standard penpapertech/bothy

On the first start it downloads the library into the bothy-data volume. Watch it with docker logs -f bothy. The download resumes if it's interrupted, and every file is checked.

⁠Use it

• On the hub computer: http://localhost:8080⁠
• On a phone or laptop on the same Wi-Fi: http://<the hub's address>:8080, e.g. http://192.168.1.23:8080
• Add maps, books and more: open Manage on the hub's page. The first visit asks you to choose an admin password, so do that straight away. Anyone on the Wi-Fi can read, search and chat; only adding or removing content needs the password. It downloads in the background, and the hub switches over without a restart.

Port 8443 is HTTPS (with a self-signed certificate), which chat needs for voice messages and sharing your location.

⁠Keep it up to date

docker exec -it bothy bothy-hub get                       # fetch new or changed content
docker pull penpapertech/bothy && docker rm -f bothy        # new program version, then run the docker run command again

Your library stays in the bothy-data volume in both cases.

⁠Options

To change options, run docker rm -f bothy, then docker run again with the new ones. Your library is kept.

Other commands, all run with docker exec -it bothy bothy-hub …:

• check: is everything downloaded and ready?
• maps germany: find maps; maps add uk / maps remove uk adds or removes one.
• reset-password: forget the Manage password.

⁠Details

• Images: linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 (Raspberry Pi 4/5, Apple silicon). The image holds only the program (about 120 MB); content goes into /data.
• Content downloads from https://data.pocketbothy.com⁠. Each source keeps its licence and attribution: Wikipedia, Appropedia and Stack Exchange are CC BY-SA; wikiHow and iFixit are CC BY-NC-SA (non-commercial); maps are © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); the books are public domain from Project Gutenberg, with its licence inside each book. The full list is in the source repository.
• Source: https://github.com/penpapertech/bothy⁠ (AGPL-3.0)