Introducing Lunar Paper: 19 self-hosted applications for planning, creating and automation

#showdev #ai #vibecoding #automation

Hi, I’m Ben. I’ve spent more than 15 years working with low-code, collaboration and content management systems in government.

Drawing on that experience, I’d like to introduce Lunar Paper: a self-hosted platform with 19 applications for planning, design, creative work, data, analytics, automation and content management.

It runs with Docker Compose, and most applications support live collaboration, with shared account management and permissions across the platform.

Lunar Paper is now available in public beta, and the full platform is free for up to three people, with no time limit.

How it started
A couple of years ago, I started experimenting with AI to see what it could do. After a couple of restarts and a huge amount of scope expansion, this is the result.

The codebase is fully AI-generated and is approaching 1.5 million lines of application code, excluding dependencies and generated assets.

Over the two years I have used a variety of different AI models.

What’s included
The applications cover several domains.

Planning and delivery

Projects: plans, budgets and risks.
Task Boards: Kanban, sprints and milestones.
Resources: resource planning.
Team Calendar: events, schedules and leave.

Processes, data and reporting

Forms: drag-and-drop forms.
Automation: workflows and human approvals.
Data Hub: data connections and transformations.
Dashboards: visual reports.

Documents and communication

Documents: structured document building.
Workspaces: documents, diagrams and research together.
Charts and Flowcharts: charts and process diagrams.
Slideshow: linear and spatial presentations.
Email Builder: reusable email templates.

Creative tools and assets

Asset Management: shared files and media.
Design Studio: graphics and layouts.
Brand Hub: logos, colours and fonts.
Pixel Art: sprites and animation.
Image Generation: AI image creation and editing.
Audio Creator: instruments and audio composition.

How the applications fit together
You create a Service to group related work and content together. A service could represent a team, a client engagement or an area of your business.

It holds the relevant applications, content, members and permissions. This also gives the applications a shared context for working together—for example, collecting information through a form, processing it through an automation and reporting on it in a dashboard.

Administration and integrations
The platform includes shared administration for:

Access: local accounts, OIDC single sign-on, users, teams and roles.
Networking: outbound proxy routing and controls for trusted internal hosts.
Connections: data sources, email delivery and publishing destinations.
Operations: audit logs and workflow monitoring.
Reusable resources: themes, templates and creative libraries.

AI features are optional. You bring your own providers and credentials, it supports registration of multiple providers and has AI personalities that adjust the work AI does.

Running it during the beta
So far, I’ve tested Lunar Paper myself, in my own environments. It hasn’t yet had testing by other people across different setups. I expect bugs, and security issues may still surface.

There is also a companion Docker service, Lunar Paper Publisher, for serving published content outside the main platform, including forms, pages, documents and slideshows.

Installation uses Docker Compose. The free tier includes all applications and features for up to three people, with no time limit.

The public GitHub repository contains deployment materials and instructions.