Puter is the odd one in this guide, and worth twenty minutes purely as a thing to look at. It’s a desktop environment that runs in a browser tab: a window manager, a file system, a notepad, a spreadsheet, a camera, a terminal, an app store — all of it web, all of it self-hostable, AGPL-3.0.

Try it

The hosted version at puter.com needs nothing. To run your own:

  curl -fsSL https://puter.com/selfhost | sh          # Linux and macOS
  
  irm https://puter.com/selfhost?os=windows | iex     # Windows

Or from source, which is the honest way to see how it works:

  git clone https://github.com/HeyPuter/puter
cd puter && npm install && npm start
# → http://puter.localhost:4100

Piping an installer straight into a shell is a habit worth resisting in general — read the script first, as you would for anything else.

Two things it’s for

As a user, it’s a cloud drive with the small applications around it: store files, open one in a text editor or spreadsheet without downloading it, share a link. On your own server, that’s a personal drive whose storage limit is your disk.

As a developer, it’s a platform. Puter exposes cloud storage, a key-value database, AI calls, and serverless workers to apps that run inside it, plus an app store to publish to. Building a small tool against those APIs is genuinely fast, because the account system, storage, and hosting are already there.

Being realistic about it

  • It’s a computing environment, not a replacement for your operating system. The browser sandbox is the ceiling: no native applications, no local device access beyond what the web platform grants.
  • The apps are capable, not Office. A notepad and a spreadsheet that work well enough in a tab — reach for real ones when the document matters.
  • A self-hosted instance is a web application holding your files. Authentication, TLS, and backups are yours. Behind Tailscale is the easy answer for personal use.
  • The hosted version is someone else’s server again — fine for trying it, worth remembering when the point of the exercise was to stop doing that.

That’s the tour

Self-hosting means owning the hardware too — including the evening it won’t boot → IP KVM

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Last updated 07 Sep 2026, 00:00 UTC. history