What is vaultarr?

Vaultarr is a self-hosted application that turns a folder of game files into a browsable digital museum. You point it at the folders where your games already live, and a background process automatically enriches each one with cover art, screenshots, descriptions, and other metadata pulled from sources like LaunchBox, IGDB, RAWG, Steam, Wikipedia, and SteamGridDB, so you spend your time browsing a curated collection instead of manually organizing files. The interface presents each game as a floating card inside a museum style layout, with a home screen described as a calm lobby and plain language status updates from what the project calls its Curator. Beyond basic library scanning, Vaultarr can find trailers, track community patches and compatibility notes, group games into smart collections, and show a preservation status for each title covering any known issues or archived assets. A notable feature is its manual finder, which searches an indexed archive of scanned game manuals and falls back to a second manual only source when nothing suitable is found. Every manual is validated as a real PDF file, checked for a safe size limit, and matched against the correct scan resolution before it gets saved locally, so downloads are not left to guesswork. The normal way to run Vaultarr is Docker Compose, pulling a prebuilt image rather than building it yourself, with your games folder, a config folder, and a backups folder mounted as volumes. It also runs on Windows without Docker by extracting a release zip and launching a batch file. After first launch, a short onboarding flow walks you through adding your library and starting an initial scan. Vaultarr can require a login, with passwords stored in hashed form rather than plain text, and Docker users can set an initial admin username and password through environment variables. The project describes itself as an alpha release, with ongoing interface refinements and quality passes across its templates and scripts.