Homebutler

A single Go binary that remembers what your server looked like last time, and tells you — or an agent — what moved.

Section rules, labels, and severities are colour-coded in a terminal. Colour is dropped automatically when output is piped, redirected, or run from cron.

That is the whole idea. Most homelab tools show you a graph of right now, and leave "does this matter?" to you. HomeButler remembers what your server looked like last time, decides what is worth saying, and says it — six containers before and six after is not "no change" when one of them is a different container.

Every line is three columns: what kind of change , what it happened to , and what exactly happened . The kind is one of eight words, and it is the same word in --json , so an agent branches on it without reading prose:

The header names the snapshot being compared against, so "what changed" is never ambiguous about the window it covers.

Can I install this self-hosted app without hand-writing another compose file?

No daemon required. No database. No always-on web service. Just one Go binary you can use from the terminal, scripts, a web dashboard, or AI tools.

The design goal is simple: give humans and agents a narrow, structured interface to the server. HomeButler returns readable summaries and JSON instead of asking you to trust a black-box shell session.