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

1. Start a tree. Name it and add yourself and your closest family.
2. 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.
3. Invite relatives. Share one family code on WhatsApp or email; you approve each request.
4. 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

Guide
Installation	Local and Docker setup
Configuration	Every environment variable
Usage	Trees, people, invitations, claims, privacy
Architecture	How it is built
Deployment	Docker, Cloudflare Tunnel, Raspberry Pi, backups
Troubleshooting	Common problems
FAQ	Questions people ask

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