HomeButler is a free, open-source Go binary that monitors, backs up and self-heals a homelab via CLI, web dashboard, or AI tools through MCP.
HomeButler is a free, open-source operations tool built for people who run a homelab, a collection of self-hosted services on a home server or small cluster, and want an easy way to monitor health, catch problems early and recover automatically when something breaks. It ships as a single Go binary with zero external dependencies, so there is nothing else to install to get a CLI, a terminal dashboard, and a web UI running.
The project was created by a developer publishing under the handle Higangssh and was introduced through Hacker News and a DEV Community writeup explaining its central design idea: let AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor help manage a homelab through a structured MCP interface, without ever giving the AI raw SSH or shell access to the machine.
HomeButler's 'doctor' command diagnoses common homelab issues such as disk and memory pressure, stopped containers, unexpectedly exposed public ports and stale backups, while its 'butler report' produces a concise health summary with change detection over time. It detects container crashes and restart loops, capturing logs before and after failures to help pinpoint root causes.
Beyond diagnostics, it can install self-hosted apps with one command via Docker Compose, map the topology of running containers and services across multiple servers over SSH, back up and restore Docker volumes with verification drills, and wake sleeping machines remotely via Wake-on-LAN. A built-in MCP server exposes all of this to AI tools through structured JSON rather than shell access.
HomeButler is entirely free and released under the MIT license, with the full source code available on GitHub. There is no paid tier, subscription, or commercial edition; anyone can download the binary or build it from source at no cost.
Because it is a community side project rather than a funded company, there is no enterprise support contract or SLA on offer; users rely on the GitHub issue tracker and community contributions for support, which is typical for a lightweight open-source infrastructure tool of this size.
Yes, HomeButler is completely free and open source under the MIT license, with no paid tier or subscription.
It monitors, diagnoses, backs up and self-heals a homelab, letting you manage Docker containers, servers and services from a CLI, terminal dashboard, web UI, or through AI tools via its MCP server.
No. HomeButler's MCP server exposes homelab data and actions to AI assistants only through structured JSON operations, deliberately avoiding raw shell or SSH access.
It ships as a single Go binary installable via Homebrew, a curl script, npm (for the MCP component), or building from source with Go, and manages Docker, systemd and PM2 backed services.
It was created by a developer publishing under the GitHub handle Higangssh and introduced publicly via Hacker News and a DEV Community article.
Alternatives include Uptime Kuma for status monitoring, Portainer or Dockge for container management, and Netdata for system metrics, though HomeButler combines several of these functions plus AI-safe integration in one binary.