Why the name?
Manioc (cassava) keeps in the ground until it's needed. It needs no granary and no landlord's storehouse, and it's harvested on the grower's own schedule. Your server works the same way: it stays in your house, out of sight, and answers only when Tor brings a visitor to it. The name nods to James C. Scott's writing on the crops small farmers have relied on to stay independent; the engineering is our own.
Who it's for
For writers, community groups, families and small projects who want a website without a hosting company, a monthly bill, or putting their home address in a domain registry. Manioc Server is general-purpose software for lawful use; the project doesn't host, list or monitor anyone's site.
How it works, in one breath
You boot a USB installer, click through a short walkthrough, copy one computer-generated phrase onto paper, pick a site type — simple pages or a journal — write something, and press Go Live. Onion services connect outward to the Tor network, so your site works from behind any home router, with no public IP address at all.
Under the hood, three sandboxed containers each do exactly one job:
- Your website runs in a container with no network at all. It cannot phone home, scan your network, or leak an address it has never seen — and it never holds the site's onion key.
- The Tor gateway is the only part allowed online, and it speaks only Tor. It passes requests to your site over a unix socket — a channel that carries no IP address to leak. Tor's modern defences (proof-of-work, rate limits) are on by default.
- A client-only helper checks “is my site reachable from the outside?” and fetches signed updates, so maintenance never reveals the server's own Tor identity and never touches the open internet.
Around them: whole-disk encryption with a phrase typed at every boot (unplug the machine and it is a sealed brick), a firewall that continuously compares itself against a golden copy and fails closed if they differ, updates scheduled at randomised times so they don't betray your timezone, and photos that have their location metadata stripped before they are published.
There is no website login and no web admin panel — the most-attacked door on the internet simply doesn't exist. You edit your site in a plain local app on the machine itself, unlocked by short generated login words.
What you can host
Version 1 is pages and a journal — static sites with a local editor, no comments, no visitor logins. On top of that, the app slot in the current development tree lets owners install their own software — a forum, WordPress, DokuWiki, Gitea, and Polyculture Markets as a ready-made recipe — inside the same sealed container. Containment is a property of the wiring, not of curation: the software can be compromised without giving up the address. The new build carrying the app recipes is proven in testing and will be published after a final re-check on real hardware.
What we don't claim
- Nobody can promise you can never be located. Tor hides where a server is on the network, not when it is online. A patient observer comparing your site's uptime with public power/internet outage reports may narrow things down over time. If being physically located would put you in danger, do not rely on hosting from your home.
- Not protection against an adversary who can watch large parts of the Tor network itself. No home-hosting product solves that.
- Not magic for a running, stolen, seized, or already-compromised machine. The ironclad state is powered off.
We would rather publish the limits on the front page than let you discover them later. Full detail on the Security page.
Where the project is
The design has been through two rounds of independent external security review — including reviews that corrected us, which we adopted. The installer, encrypted boot, container stack, dashboard, and page/journal editors are built and passing end-to-end install tests on our test rig. An alpha test build is available now — for testing. Until an external security review of the built system is complete, do not rely on this software if being located would cause you harm. Still ahead before a finished public release: testing on real home hardware, testing with non-technical users, an external security review of the built system, and reproducible releases that independent builders can verify bit-for-bit.