Family Tree
Self-hosted, collaborative genealogy. Build a family tree together with relatives, keep every change in history, and stay in control of your data. It runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 or a small VPS behind a Cloudflare Tunnel, with SQLite as the only database.
How it works
- Start a tree. Name it and add yourself and your closest family.
- Add family. Pick a relationship and the implied links are offered for you: add a child to a father and his wife is suggested as the other parent.
- Invite relatives. Share one family code on WhatsApp or email; you approve each request.
- They claim themselves. Relatives claim their own profile and keep their branch up to date. Married into another family? My families shows both trees joined at you.
Features
- Trees and people: first, middle, last and maiden names, gender, birth and death dates in AD or Bikram Sambat (BS), places, biography, events and photos.
- Relationships: parents, spouses, siblings and guardians. Grandparents, cousins and in-laws are derived, and "How are we related?" names the relation and shows the path.
- Tree view: zoom and pan, top-down or left-to-right layout, and a focus mode for large trees (tested up to 50 000 people).
- Combined family view: a person claimed in several trees (for example after a marriage) sees them joined at themselves, decides who else may see it, and can mark the same relative in both trees as one person.
- Collaboration: family and direct join codes, owner/editor/contributor/viewer roles, profile claims (with verification questions or owner review), notifications, and a full change history with one-click revert and undo.
- Search: full-text search (Latin and Devanagari), typo-tolerant fuzzy search, filters by birth year and place, a duplicate finder and a surname explorer.
- Privacy: private by default. Public trees and member exports hide living people. Photos are never cacheable by shared caches.
- Import and export: GEDCOM 5.5.1, JSON and CSV, plus tree backups and instance backup/restore scripts.
- Accounts: email and password, optional Google sign-in, email verification and password reset over SMTP.
- Installable: works as a PWA with an offline fallback page, in light and dark themes, on phones and desktops.
Quick start
Docker (production)
git clone https://github.com/chandanshakya/family-tree.git
cd family-tree
cp .env.example .env # fill in ORIGIN, secrets, tunnel token, SMTP
docker compose up -d --build
The app is reachable only through Cloudflare Tunnel. See docs/deployment.md for the full guide, including Raspberry Pi tuning, Cloudflare settings and backups.
Local development
Requires Node 22 or newer.
npm ci
npm run dev # http://localhost:5173, creates ./data/family.db
Documentation
The design record (specification, decisions, audit, benchmarks) lives in docs/project.
Tech stack
SvelteKit 2 with Svelte 5, Node 22 (adapter-node), SQLite (better-sqlite3 and Drizzle ORM), Tailwind CSS 4 with shadcn-svelte, d3-zoom, sharp, Vitest and Playwright.
Contributing
Contributions are welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md and the Code of Conduct. Report security issues privately as described in SECURITY.md.
License
MIT © Chandan Shakya
