metanarium

Coming soon A home for everything you know

Your world, described.

Metanarium is a self-hosted library for everything you keep — books and records, recipes and tools, heirlooms, trips and half-finished ideas. Give anything a name, describe it in your own words, and find it again.

See what it does Runs on your own server →
The Metanarium library: a grid of items — a road trip with a landscape photo, a vinyl record with its cover, a houseplant — with saved searches and filters above.

Store anything.

Describe everything.

Find it again.

No template required

An item can be anything.

Most collection apps decide for you what a book, a plant or a camera should look like. Metanarium doesn't. Every item starts with just a name — the rest is up to you.

Start with a title

Only a name is required. The type is whatever you call it — book, ferment, field recording — and you can change your mind later.

Describe it your way

Add the fields that matter for this thing: text, numbers, yes/no, dates, links, lists and nested details. Write notes in Markdown, with headings, tables and quotes.

Attach any file

Drop in photos, scans, PDFs, audio or video. Images get thumbnails, and PDFs, text, audio and video preview right in the page.

Describe

The details that matter, kept together.

A trip has dates, a distance and who came along. A record has a label, a speed and a track list. Metanarium stores each item's own fields as structured data, so they stay searchable and sortable — not buried in a note.

  • Typed fields: text, numbers, yes/no, dates, URLs, lists and nested objects
  • Rich Markdown notes, rendered safely
  • Tags with autocomplete, descriptions and usage counts
  • Archive what you no longer need; restore anything from the trash
An item page for a road trip to Iceland: tags, a Markdown description with highlights, and metadata fields for start and end dates, budget, companions and distance.

Organise

Shelves of your own making.

Group items into collections, nest them as deep as you like, and put one item on as many shelves as it belongs on. The sourdough recipe can live in Kitchen and in Favourites without being copied.

  • Nested collections with an icon and a description
  • Items in any number of collections
  • Merge duplicate tags, or rename one everywhere at once
  • Bulk actions on hundreds of items in one step
The collections page: Family archive, Home with Garden and Kitchen nested inside, Library, Music shelf, Travels with Iceland 2025 nested inside, and Workshop, each with an icon and item count.

Connect

Everything relates to something.

The book you read on the trip, the camera that took the photos, the starter the bread needs. Link items with relations you name yourself, and see them from both sides. Rename an item and every link still points to it.

  • Typed, directed relations with an optional note
  • Shown on both items, so nothing is one-way
  • Files stored with a checksum, replaceable in place
  • Inline previews for images, PDF, text, audio and video
The attachments and relations of the Iceland trip: two landscape photos and an itinerary, linked to the book read during it, a recommended book, a field recording made during it, and the film camera used on it.

Find

Ask your library a real question.

Search reads titles, notes and every field value, with title matches first. When a keyword isn't enough, add conditions: everything from before 1980, every book you haven't read, every tool bought before 2020. Save the search and run it again with one click.

  • Full-text search across titles, notes and metadata
  • Conditions on numbers, dates, yes/no and text: between, before, one of, starts with, exists, missing
  • Combine with tags, type, collection and state
  • Saved searches, one click away
The saved search 'Older than 1980' with the condition year less than 1980, finding Dune, Kind of Blue, an Olympus OM-1 camera and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Anywhere

At the desk, or standing in the kitchen.

Metanarium works in any modern browser, from a wide monitor to a phone propped against the flour jar. Light and dark themes included.

A sourdough recipe open on a phone, with tags and an ingredient table.

AI access

Bring your assistant along.

Metanarium includes a built-in MCP server, so AI assistants that support remote MCP can search your library, add items and keep them up to date — through the same rules as the web app.

  • Personal access tokens, read-only or read-and-write
  • Tokens expire after 1–365 days and can be revoked at any time
  • Safe retries: re-sending a request never creates a duplicate
  • The same operations as the web app, from search_items to merge_tags
mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "metanarium": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://your-library.example/mcp/",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer <your-token>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Built to last

Made to be trusted with a lifetime of things.

Take it all with you

Export the whole library — items, fields, tags, collections, relations and every file — as one archive. Import it elsewhere with each file checked against its fingerprint.

Merge or duplicate libraries

Import a library as a copy with new identities, reusing tags you already have. A preview shows exactly what will change before anything does.

Nothing overwritten by accident

Edit the same item in two tabs and Metanarium notices, instead of silently keeping whichever saved last.

Deleting is a two-step affair

Deleted items go to the trash with their files and links intact. Restore them, or remove them for good when you're sure.

All or nothing

Bulk changes and imports either apply completely or not at all. No half-finished library after an error.

Private by default

Every account sees only its own library. Sessions can be revoked, and new sign-ups can be switched off once everyone is in.

Self-hosted

Yours. On your own hardware.

Metanarium runs on a machine you control — a home server, a NAS or a small cloud server. Your library lives in your own PostgreSQL database and your files on your own disk. There is no account with us and nothing to sync to someone else's cloud.

Runs with
Docker Compose
Data
PostgreSQL, files on disk
Access
Any modern browser
Integrations
REST API & MCP

Coming soon.

Metanarium is in active development. A public release is on its way.