I built a free self-hosted wardrobe organizer, and the internet seems to want one too
My partner and I spent a weekend going through our closet. Two trash bags for donation later, and we still had too much stuff. We don’t even shop that often, usually just getting what we “need”. Except it’s hard to keep track of what we “need” when we both struggle with object permanence. You know what they say, out of sight out of mind.
In a world of consumerism, it’s easy to get excited about newness. It’s also easy to lose track of what you already own. This inevitably leads to a closet overflowing with stuff, wasted money, and wasted time organizing every few months, only to realize you’ve been wearing the same 5 things while the rest of your clothes get dusty in the back of the closet.
I decided I wanted an inventory system. A way to look at my clothing, and build and plan outfits, without having to physically rummage through drawers and hangers. So I looked for a tool. There are a few wardrobe apps out there, including Stylebook, Acloset, and Cladwell, but they're subscription-based, cloud-hosted, and hand your data to a third party. On the self-hosted side, tools like Koillection and Grocy handle generic inventory, but nothing with a specific focus on clothing. The fun thing about clothing is you can plan outfits based on events, the weather, or your mood. A general purpose inventory system wasn’t going to offer that functionality.
So I built Libre-Closet. Libre-Closet is a self-hostable wardrobe organizer. You photograph your clothes, categorize them, and build saved outfits. It runs as a single Docker container with no external services or mandatory configuration. By default, Libre-Closet uses SQLite and local disk storage. However, if you prefer to use PostgreSQL or S3 storage those are also built in as an option. I also included the option to run it with JWT auth for multi-user households, or you can run it completely open for personal use. Libre-Closet is a PWA, so it installs to your phone’s home screen and works offline.
docker run -p 3000:3000 -v wardrobe-data:/data lazztech/libre-closet:latest
Try it: https://librecloset.lazz.tech (register free, no email verification)
I've been a software engineer for over a decade, mostly working in safety-critical systems. Side projects are how I stay connected to building things that are just pleasant to make. This started as exactly that, a personal tool built on the NestJS boilerplate template that I created for this exact kind of thing.
I posted to r/selfhosted two weeks ago. Within 72 hours we had 277 upvotes, 135 comments, and someone we'd never met was running their own live instance. Someone contributed an Italian translation. A self-hosting newsletter picked it up without us submitting it. It's now at 71 GitHub stars, 683 Docker pulls, and climbing.
I didn't expect that. My honest expectation was 15 upvotes and a few useful bug reports. The community signal was clear enough that I'm continuing to build it out.
v0.1.7 is live now. The feature requests coming in most consistently are wear tracking, outfit scheduling, and background removal on garment photos. Those are the v0.2 priorities. The project is AGPLv3, free, open-source, and intended to stay that way. If you self-host or if you're just tired of paying a subscription to track your own clothes, give it a try.