Getting Started
What is Kaya?
Understand what Kaya manages, who it is for and where its boundaries are.
Kaya is a self-hosted infrastructure management platform that helps users document, organise, monitor and manage their environment from one interface.
Why Kaya was created
Infrastructure information often becomes scattered across spreadsheets, notes, browser bookmarks, specialist administration tools and unconnected dashboards. Kaya provides a central place to connect the operational facts without attempting to replace every specialist platform.
Who it is for
Kaya suits homelab owners/users, system and network administrators, IT support teams, small organisations and technical teams that want to keep their operational records on infrastructure they control. Its three roles support read-only users, operational editors and administrators.
What can it do
The current interface includes:
- dashboards and live operational summaries;
- physical asset and rack records;
- Proxmox and Docker host/workload inventory;
- VLAN, IP address, DHCP range, DNS, domain and reachability records;
- browser-based SSH and RDP through Remote Manager;
- runbooks, licence-key records and configurable data fields;
- encrypted personal Secret Vaults and temporary Secure Send packages;
- user, authentication, security, email, module and audit administration.
Some modules depend on external systems. For example, DNS Manager currently integrates with Pi-hole, RDP uses guacd, and Docker inventory requires an agent. Kaya remains useful when a specialist service is unavailable because much of its managed information is stored locally.
Design principles
Kaya is self-hosted, SQLite-first, server-rendered and designed for a single application instance. Persistent data stays in bind-mounted directories. Sensitive stored values use the persistent application encryption key; browser mutations use CSRF checks; and routes apply Viewer, Editor or Admin access requirements.
Supported platforms
The confirmed deployment is a Linux container/vm/server run with Docker Engine and Docker Compose v2. Users access it through a modern browser. Direct Python execution is useful for development but is not the normal production deployment.
Open-source approach
Kaya is distributed under the licence in its public repository. Its source, issue history and releases are available from the Kaya GitHub repository.
Next steps
Check the system requirements, then install Kaya.