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Family sharing server

TidyShop works on its own, entirely on your phone. To share lists with the rest of the household, the phones need somewhere they can all reach: the TidyShop Connector, a small server you host yourself. This section is for whoever runs it. Family members who are only joining need none of this; they can go straight to Joining a family.

Setting up family sharing takes four steps. Most of the time goes into step 2, and if you already expose other self-hosted apps over HTTPS it is five minutes of copy and paste.

  1. Run the container — with Docker Compose or on Unraid.
  2. Put it behind HTTPS — a reverse proxy with a real certificate, on a hostname your phones can reach from wherever they are.
  3. Connect your own phone with the master pairing key. That makes you the family owner.
  4. Invite everyone else with a QR code — connect the app.

Before you start

You need:

  • A machine that is always on, running Docker or Unraid. A Raspberry Pi 4 is plenty.
  • A hostname, such as tidyshop.example.com, pointing at that machine — or at your router, with ports 80/443 forwarded to the reverse proxy.
  • A reverse proxy that can get a certificate for it (Let's Encrypt is fine).
  • TidyShop on each phone — it is in closed beta for now.
  • A pairing key: a random string of at least 12 characters. The install pages show how to generate one.

Plain HTTP will not work

Android blocks unencrypted connections for TidyShop, so http://192.168.1.10:8787 cannot be used as the server address — not even on your home Wi-Fi. The address you enter in the app must start with https:// and have a certificate the phone trusts.

Only on the home network?

A hostname that only resolves inside your network works, as long as it has a real certificate (for example through a DNS challenge). Lists then sync when phones are home and catch up automatically the next time they are.

Why self-hosted?

Shared lists have to live somewhere both phones can reach. Rather than run a service that holds every family's shopping habits, TidyShop lets you run that piece yourself. Your data sits in one file on your own disk, and nothing about it reaches the developer.