Self-hosting

Tealhand needs no server on your own network. Your phone and your computers connect directly. A server helps only in a few cases, and you can run each one yourself. This page lists them and links to the full guides.

What runs where

Server	What it does	Do you need one?	Run it yourself
Relay	Passes encrypted traffic when your phone can’t reach a computer directly, for example when you are away from home	Only to reach your computers from outside their network	Install Tealhand Relay, then Run your own relay
Planner	Turns one sentence into at most three proposed actions, with a local Ollama model	No. Without it the phone uses word matching	Self-host the planner
Push	Wakes the phone app when it is closed, so a notice arrives at once	Not built yet	Not yet

Your choices for the relay

You pick one on the phone (Settings, then Network) and on each computer with --relay on tealhand-host connect. How each one works: Relays.

Choice	Who runs it	What it costs
This network only	Nobody	Free
Public relays	n0, the makers of iroh	Free
My own relay	You, on a server with a public address	Free; you pay for the server

A relay holds no Tealhand key and can’t read what passes through it. Your own relay serves only the devices on your device list.

Planned

Teal Pro will add Teal’s faster relays, used with a Teal account. Push notifications will be free for everyone, and the push server will be self-hostable too. Until then, notices reach the phone while the app is open.

Today

There are no prebuilt binaries or Docker images yet. You build the relay and the planner from source:

git clone https://github.com/tealvpn/tealhand
cd tealhand
rustup toolchain install
cargo build --release -p tealhand-relay
cargo build --release -p tealhand-planner

The planner has no authentication yet. Run it on your own machine or local network only, never on the internet.

Questions

Ask in the Tealhand Discord, in #help, with the tag Self-hosting. Never post your server’s address, keys or certificates there.