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Introducing LabTether

LabTether is an open-source hub you run on your own hardware. It connects to the platforms in your homelab and to the machines where you install its agent, and shows them in one web console with metrics, alerts, a terminal and remote desktop.

The Problem

A homelab is often run from a row of browser tabs: the Proxmox web UI, Portainer, Grafana for metrics, TrueNAS for storage, and a terminal for everything else. Each tab has its own login and its own alerts.

When something goes wrong (a container crashes at 2am, a disk starts filling up, a node stops answering), you switch between those tools and piece together what happened.

What LabTether Does

LabTether connects to the tools you already run and brings what they report into one console:

  • Dashboard and Devices. Fleet health, topology, recent activity and the busiest devices on one page. Agent machines, Proxmox VMs and LXCs, TrueNAS pools and Docker containers are listed together on the Devices page.
  • Alerts. Rules for metric thresholds, missing metrics, stale heartbeats, log patterns, and HTTP, TCP, DNS and TLS-certificate checks. Notifications go to email, Slack, ntfy, Gotify or a webhook.
  • Remote access. A browser terminal on any agent machine, remote desktop over VNC, RDP, SPICE or Apple Remote Desktop (RDP needs the optional RDP gateway), and a file browser.
  • Platform actions. Start, stop and snapshot Proxmox VMs, scrub a TrueNAS pool, redeploy a Portainer stack, and run your own saved commands on several devices at once.
  • MCP server. Connect Claude, Cursor or another MCP client with a scoped API key. The client can list devices, read metrics and run commands, within what the key allows. LabTether has no AI model of its own.
  • Update plans. Plan OS package updates across devices, preview them with a dry run, run them and see each device's result. There are no automatic post-checks or rollback.
  • iPhone and iPad app. In development. It is not released yet.

Open Source

The self-hosted Hub, including its built-in connectors, is licensed under Apache-2.0, as are the Go agent, the Linux compatibility source, the protocol library, the CLI, and the Home Assistant integration. The native macOS and Windows agent apps are source-available with all rights reserved: you can read the source, but not redistribute it. The iOS app is proprietary and is not released yet.

Install

You need Docker Engine with Compose 2.33.1 or newer. Download the installer, read it, then run it:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -fsSLo install-labtether.sh https://labtether.com/install.sh
less install-labtether.sh
bash install-labtether.sh

The installer prints a command that shows the one-time setup token. Open http://localhost:3000, paste the token and create the owner account.

The documentation covers installation, connector setup and the MCP server.