(meh-NAH-juh-rist)
A lightweight, self-hostable and flexible platform for organising the things you care about.
Important
Early-stage alpha: Menagerist is at the very beginning of development. The project structure, features, API, data model, and documentation are all expected to change frequently.
Menagerist is a new self-hostable project designed to give you a flexible, user-friendly way to organise and connect information.
Instead of forcing everything into predefined categories, Menagerist lets you build your own structure around the things that matter to you. Create records for items, people, events, places, photos, notes, or anything else, then connect them together however makes sense for your collection.
The goal is to make building and maintaining a collection feel natural, without requiring you to fit your data into someone else's idea of how it should be organised.
Menagerist is currently in its initial project setup phase.
The current focus is establishing the core concepts, shaping the underlying data model, and building the first usable foundation. Expect rough edges, missing features, and breaking changes while the project takes shape.
Menagerist aims to provide a flexible foundation for organising and exploring your own data:
- Flexible records: Create records for items, people, events, places, media, notes, or anything else you need
- Connections: Link records together with meaningful relationships
- Custom types and metadata: Shape Menagerist around your collection rather than adapting your collection to Menagerist
- Media: Upload and associate photos and other media with your records
- Search & browsing: Quickly find information and explore connected records
- Simple interface: A clean, approachable web interface designed to make managing your data easy
- API: A simple API for integrating Menagerist with other tools and services
- Data imports: Potential support for importing existing collections from formats such as CSV and Excel
- Metadata enrichment: Optional integrations with services such as TMDB, MusicBrainz, and others
- Privacy & ownership: Your data stays under your control
- Easy self-hosting: Designed to be straightforward to run and maintain yourself
Menagerist is inspired by the idea of a menagerie, a carefully curated collection of things.
Rather than being built around one particular type of collection, Menagerist is intended to be general-purpose and adaptable. Whether you're cataloguing memorabilia, tracking people and events, documenting a hobby, or building something entirely your own, you should be able to structure the information in a way that makes sense to you.
The underlying idea is simple:
Your collection, your structure.
Menagerist aims to make that flexibility approachable, while keeping the experience simple enough that you don't need to be a database expert to use it.
A subtle nod to Star Trek: The Original Series: The Menagerie.