Eight.ly OS¶
For the home or small-business server, Eight.ly OS replaces your NAS, your container manager and your VM and LXC host with one system that survives a dead box and can tell you what is wrong.
Eight.ly OS is one product: a bootable image you install on bare metal or in a VM. It brings a curated catalog of 3,200+ self-hosted apps, the Nova AI assistant, a web terminal, VM and LXC management, and a full NAS storage stack — all from one dashboard.
You shouldn't need to wrestle with compose files, parity syntax, or Samba configs just to run Plex, Nextcloud, and a media library on a NAS at home. Eight.ly does the plumbing so you can click Deploy.
Your admin account
The first screen of the setup wizard creates your admin account — you pick the username and password, there is no default login.
What you get¶
- 3,200+ app templates across 14 groups — media, movies & TV, downloaders, AI, home automation, productivity, security, networking, tools, and more
- Three deploy modes — Standard (IP:port), Traefik (SSL + subdomain), Traefik + Authelia (SSO + 2FA)
- Real-time deployment — watch container pulls and startup via Server-Sent Events
- Container management — Portainer-style panel with Overview / Logs / Environment / Network tabs
- Dozzle live log streaming built in
- Prometheus + Grafana + Loki + cAdvisor — optional one-click monitoring stack
- GPU detection + passthrough — NVIDIA + Intel for AI (Ollama, ComfyUI, Stable Diffusion) and transcoding (Plex, Jellyfin, Tdarr)
- Ranked global search — name matches score highest, then descriptions, then tags
- SnapRAID + MergerFS, or ZFS — lose a drive without losing your data; mix any drive sizes, or run a ZFS pool on matched drives
- The Shelver — the cache mover: fast writes land on an SSD tier, swept to spinning drives on your schedule
- Native SMB + NFS file sharing
- System health — drive SMART, temperature, service status, with alerts
- Nova AI assistant — 41 tools, natural language server management
- Web terminal — full PTY + tmux with session persistence
- KVM/QEMU virtual machines and LXC containers
- Backups — local and to the Eight.ly Backup Server, included free with your license
- Clustering — Breezeway (live migration of a running VM between nodes with zero ports opened) and Rehome (fences a dead node, relocates the workload, brings it home on recovery)
- Featherfall — the self-update that can't brick the box: verify, swap, health-check, automatic rollback
- Mobile-responsive dashboard — works on phones and tablets in a browser. A dedicated Eight.ly Mobile app has not been released yet.
- API for automation —
eos_prefixed API keys for scripts and mobile connectivity
See what a license does and doesn't gate, and current pricing.
App categories¶
| Category | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Media | Music, photos, books, comics, podcasts, and the *arr automation tools (Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr) |
| Movies & TV | Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, DVR/recording, transcoding, requests (Overseerr, Jellyseerr) |
| Downloaders | qBittorrent, Transmission, SABnzbd, Deluge, indexers |
| AI | Ollama, ComfyUI, Stable Diffusion, Open WebUI, local LLM and image tools |
| Home Automation | Home Assistant, Node-RED, Zigbee2MQTT, ESPHome |
| Cloud | Nextcloud, file sync, photo backup, object storage |
| Productivity | Databases (Postgres, MySQL, Redis), notes/wikis (Bookstack), task management, office docs |
| Security | Vaultwarden, Authentik, Authelia, Pi-hole, AdGuard Home |
| Network | Traefik, Nginx Proxy Manager, WireGuard, Tailscale |
| Tools | Dashboards, uptime monitoring (Uptime Kuma), developer tools, file managers |
| Backup | Cloud backup, snapshots, sync, disaster recovery |
| Game Servers | Minecraft, survival, shooters, emulation |
| Crypto | Nodes, wallets, trading |
| Other | Weather, recipes, maps, health & fitness, and more |
See the Community App Store guide for how the catalog is curated.
Credit where it's due¶
The majority of the app catalog uses LinuxServer.io container images — the gold standard for self-hosted containers. We're proud to be a sponsor. If you love what they do, consider supporting them too.
The app catalog is maintained by Eight.ly in the private imogenlabs/eightly-templates repo. Each app has its own folder with a compose file and metadata, curated and updated by us — no external feed, no upstream dependency. Container images are still pulled from wherever the publisher ships them (Docker Hub, GHCR, Quay, LinuxServer.io, etc.).
Links¶
- eight.ly — product home + pricing
- Discord — help, setup tips, beta access, questions and feature requests
- Imogen Labs — who builds Eight.ly