contextbay
← Blog

Introducing ContextBay: Your Homelab Command Center

announcementlaunch

If you run a homelab, your browser probably has a tab problem. Portainer for containers, Grafana for dashboards, n8n for automation, Wazuh for security, Obsidian for documentation. Five tools, five logins, five update cycles, five sets of configs to back up. Each one is excellent at its job. Together, they're a maintenance tax that scales with every new service you deploy.

Today we're launching ContextBay — a single self-hosted platform that replaces all of them. One Go binary. One Docker image. One UI.

One Platform, Not Five

ContextBay is not a wrapper around existing tools. It's a purpose-built homelab command center with a Go backend, an embedded Next.js frontend, and a master/worker architecture designed for multi-node setups from day one.

Deploy the master node on your primary server. Add workers on every other machine. ContextBay handles the rest — container lifecycle, system monitoring, workflow automation, knowledge management, security analysis, and AI-powered operations — all through a single interface.

Container & Stack Management

Full Docker lifecycle management: create, start, stop, restart, remove. Real-time resource stats per container — CPU, memory, network I/O — streamed over WebSocket so you never need to refresh. Browse images, volumes, and networks across every node. Deploy multi-container stacks from Compose files with a built-in YAML editor and one-click deploy.

# Deploy ContextBay master
docker run -d \
  --name contextbay \
  -p 7480:7480 \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  -v contextbay-data:/data \
  ghcr.io/contextbay/contextbay-master:latest

System Census

Most container managers stop at Docker. ContextBay goes deeper. The System Census scans every connected worker and reports back: running systemd services, open ports, active processes, cron jobs, shell scripts, installed packages. You get full visibility into what's running on bare metal, not just inside containers.

This is the kind of insight that usually requires SSH-ing into each machine and running a dozen commands. ContextBay collects it automatically and presents it in a single searchable view.

Discord 2-Way Control

Manage your homelab from your phone. ContextBay ships with a Discord bot supporting 14 slash commands: check container status, restart services, query metrics, trigger workflows, and more. The bot also pushes notifications — alert triggers, container crashes, workflow completions — directly to your Discord server.

An AI agent mode lets you interact conversationally: "What's using the most memory right now?" or "Restart the database container on worker-1" — and ContextBay executes it.

Claude Code Integration

ContextBay is the first homelab platform built with AI-native operations in mind. Connect Claude Code as an operations agent with full access to your infrastructure through MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools.

  • Multi-Session — Run multiple Claude Code sessions in parallel, each with its own context
  • Agent Modes — Configure autonomous, supervised, or read-only access per session
  • MCP Tools — Claude can list containers, read logs, deploy stacks, query metrics, and trigger workflows through structured tool calls
  • Context-Aware — Sessions inherit your infrastructure context: what's running, what's alerting, what changed recently

Workflow Automation (n8n)

ContextBay deploys n8n as a sub-container (cb-n8n) and bootstraps it for you on first boot — owner account, API key, encryption key, and 36 seeded workflows ready to fire. The typed event bus inside CB is bridged to n8n via webhooks, so any state change (alert fired, container crashed, deploy completed) can trigger 500+ built-in n8n nodes — Slack, Discord, Linear, GitHub, HTTP, anything.

No separate install, no separate login: n8n shows up in the CB UI with its own iframe and is managed alongside everything else.

Knowledge Base

A built-in markdown wiki with [[wiki-links]], bidirectional references, and an interactive Cytoscape.js graph view showing how your pages connect. Document your network topology, runbooks, deployment notes, and architecture decisions right next to the infrastructure they describe.

No more context-switching to a separate wiki or notes app. Your documentation lives where your infrastructure lives.

Monitoring & Dashboards

Prometheus-compatible metrics collection with custom dashboards built from configurable panels: time-series charts (powered by ECharts), gauges, stat cards, and tables. Define threshold-based alert rules with notification routing to Discord, webhooks, or email. Import your existing Prometheus alert rules directly.

Real-time WebSocket updates mean your dashboards are always live. No polling, no manual refresh.

Security Monitor

Wazuh-grade security without the Wazuh complexity. ContextBay integrates log analysis and file integrity monitoring (FIM) directly into the platform. Define which files and directories to watch, get notified when they change, and browse a timeline of security events across all nodes. Correlate security events with container activity and system changes in a single view.

AI Skills

Eight built-in AI skills that go beyond chat: log analysis, anomaly detection, capacity planning, incident summarization, and more. ContextBay routes requests to Claude Code for complex reasoning or Ollama for local, private inference — automatically picking the right model for the job. You can also define custom skills that combine tool calls, prompts, and workflow triggers.

Getting Started

You can go from zero to a running ContextBay instance in under two minutes:

  1. Deploy the master — Run the Docker one-liner above. ContextBay starts on port 8080.
  2. Walk through setup — Open http://<MASTER_LAN_IP>:7480 in your browser. The setup wizard guides you through creating an admin account, naming your instance, and configuring basic settings.
  3. Add your first worker — Run the worker container on another machine. It auto-registers with the master and starts reporting within seconds.
  4. Explore — Your containers, system metrics, and Docker networks are already visible. Start building dashboards, writing wiki pages, and creating workflows.

What's Next

This launch is just the beginning. Here's what's on the roadmap:

  • More Agent Modes — Autonomous remediation, predictive scaling, and self-healing workflows where AI agents take action based on infrastructure state
  • Platform Validation Convoy — Built-in infrastructure tests: verify container health, network connectivity, DNS resolution, drift, and backup integrity on a schedule
  • Community Workflow Repo — A curated contextbay-workflows repo of importable n8n workflows for common homelab patterns
  • Mobile Companion — A lightweight mobile interface for on-the-go monitoring and quick actions
  • Multi-Tenant Support — Share a ContextBay instance across teams with role-based access control and isolated views

Open Source

ContextBay is MIT licensed. The source code is on GitHub. Star it, fork it, open issues, submit PRs. We're building this in the open because we believe the best homelab tools come from the homelab community.

Ready to try it? Get started on GitHub or read the documentation.