Contrack puts self-hosted contact management within reach
Contacts accumulate across dozens of applications. Social networks, professional platforms, and personal databases each hold fragments of the same relationships. When every app requests access to your address book, the sense of ownership frays. Contrack was built to answer this moment: a self-hosted contact management system that keeps your network under your control, on your terms.
Why the scattered contact problem matters
Most people maintain contacts in multiple places. Apple Contacts, Google People, LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends—each platform silos data and makes cross-referencing difficult. Even when someone diligently updates a primary contact record, there is no native mechanism to keep the enrichment flowing: roles change, milestones pass, relationships evolve. Manual entry becomes burdensome and quickly goes stale. Contrack addresses this by treating your contact network as a single source of truth that you host yourself, on hardware you own.
A four-step workflow for keeping relationships alive
Contrack organizes around a four-step process designed to reduce friction at every stage. The first step is import: drop contacts in from Apple, Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Connect a calendar or inbox, and past conversations and meetings appear automatically on each person's timeline. This eliminates the initial grunt work of re-entering information that already exists elsewhere.
The second step merges duplicates. The same friend captured in three address books becomes one profile. Contrack highlights obvious matches and lets you review the rest side by side. A 90-day undo window means you can always reconsider if the system merges incorrectly.
The third step adds context. Paste a quick note such as "Met at Sarah's wedding, loves natural wine, kids are Leo and Maya, catch up every quarter" or "Partner at Sequoia, follow up next Tuesday on seed round," and Contrack expands it into a complete profile with dates, tags, and reminders. Alternatively, let web research fill in roles and links with cited sources, turning a brief observation into a richer record.
The fourth step generates reminders. Write a note in plain language like "next Tuesday" and Contrack converts it into an automatic reminder. Set how often you want to stay in touch, and each morning the app shows who is due. Birthdays, anniversaries, and custom milestones surface without requiring you to memorize them.
Morning briefings and powerful search
Each day Contrack delivers a calm briefing: follow-ups due today, people you haven't spoken with in a while, and upcoming milestones. Search works privately on your machine. Ask in plain words—"Who do I know in Lisbon?" or "Who loves natural wine?"—and results come straight from your own contacts and notes. No cloud query, no third-party processing.
Navigation is equally streamlined. Press Cmd+K to jump to anyone, filter by company or tag, or log a quick note without lifting your hands from the keyboard. Planning a trip? See everyone you know in a city at a glance. Draw a loop around a neighborhood to select everyone there and add them to a dinner list.
One app, multiple deployments
Contrack can run in several ways. The quickest path is Docker: run contrack-data volume and the image, then open http://localhost:3210. No cloud account, no API key. Everything stays in the contrack-data folder. AI features are opt-in, accessible through Settings → Administration → AI, and you bring the model you trust—or use none at all.
Docker Compose offers a similar path through a services definition. For those who prefer building from source, Node.js 26.10 or later can install dependencies and run the development server. A live demo in the browser, preloaded with 400 fictional people, requires no installation and no API key.
For households or teams, sign-in can be required by setting AUTH_REQUIRED=true. The first visit creates an admin profile, and family or teammates can be invited from Settings → Administration → Accounts. The self-hosting guide covers remote access, backups, and upgrades.
Privacy as the foundation, not a setting
Contrack's philosophy is that privacy is not a toggle but the default state. The app lives on your own computer or home server. Relationships are not used to train anyone's model, do not sit on a rented cloud, and are not locked behind a monthly subscription. Search happens entirely on your device. Share one home server with your family or team while keeping everyone's address book completely private to them.
When AI is desired, you choose the model. Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor in one click so your favorite assistant can look up context and log notes, with read-only access whenever you prefer. If you'd rather not involve any model, that option is always available.
Rich features without compromise
The application includes everything expected of a modern contact manager: rich notes with file and image attachments, @mentions that link people together, custom dates and anniversaries, lists and tags, passkey sign-in, a 90-day trash with undo, and open exports anytime. Warm light and dark themes complete the experience.
Contrack is the work of arvarik, hosted on GitHub. It does not aim to replace the major platforms but to offer an alternative for people who want their contact data where they can reach it, not where a corporation can lock it away.