Plant care goes wrong in two places: forgetting which plant is which, and forgetting when each one was last watered. HortusFox solves both, and it does it for the whole household at once.

What is Hosted HortusFox?

HortusFox (github.com/danielbrendel/hortusfox-web) is a collaborative plant management app: catalogue every plant in the house, attach photos, set tasks, log history, share the library with the rest of the household, and chat about it in-app. PHP + MariaDB under the hood, MIT licensed, and actively developed.

Hosted HortusFox is that app running on ElfHosted: 24/7 uptime on your own HTTPS subdomain, MariaDB sidecar pre-wired, photo storage on a persistent volume, and ElfHosted SSO on the front door so the household shares one login instead of fiddling with HortusFox accounts.

Why HortusFox Makes Life Easier

• 🌿 One catalogue, every plant. Indoor, outdoor, balcony, allotment, the cactus on the desk you keep forgetting the name of. Tag, locate, photograph, done.
• 💧 Tasks that do not get forgotten. Watering, feeding, repotting, pruning. The dashboard shows what is due, what is overdue, and who last did it.
• 📸 Photo timeline per plant. Compare last winter's leggy basil against this winter's healthier one. Notes are timestamped and searchable.
• 👨‍👩‍👧 Household-wide. Multi-user by design. Everyone gets a login, sees the same library, edits the same task list. No more "I thought you watered it".
• 📅 Calendar, history, and group chat. See the schedule, audit what changed, and discuss the suspicious yellow leaves without leaving the app.

Product Highlights

Plant catalogue with location, species, common name, custom attributes, and unlimited photos per entry. Built-in search means the cactus you bought eighteen months ago is one query away rather than a scroll-and-squint exercise.

Tasks tie into the calendar view, so the watering rota and the repotting reminder are visible to everyone with an account. Tick them off as you go, and the history log records who did what and when.

Inventory tracking for the bits around the plants: fertilisers, pots, soil mixes, seed packets. Useful when you cannot remember whether the bag of perlite is full or about to run out.

Group chat inside the app keeps household plant talk in one place rather than scattered across SMS, WhatsApp, and post-it notes on the kitchen counter. Weather integration shows local conditions next to the dashboard, which matters more than you would think for the balcony tomatoes.

Mobile-friendly PWA for tending to plants where the plants actually live, plus a REST API for the inevitable Home Assistant automation.

Technical Specifications

• 🛠️ Software: HortusFox (FOSS, MIT)
• 📦 Stack: PHP + MariaDB
• 🐘 Database: MariaDB sidecar, managed by ElfHosted
• 📷 Photo storage: persistent volume in your tenant, survives restarts and updates
• 👥 Multi-user: any number of household accounts, admin roles supported
• 📅 Built-in: dashboard, tasks, inventory, calendar, history, weather, group chat, themes
• 🔌 API: REST API for automations and integrations
• 📲 Mobile: responsive PWA, installable on iOS / Android home screens
• 🔐 Access: HTTPS on your own ElfHosted subdomain; ElfHosted SSO in front of HortusFox
• 🔑 Subscription: $9/month, MariaDB sidecar included, no per-photo or per-plant fees
• 🔄 Updates: handled by ElfHosted, tracking upstream HortusFox releases

Let ElfHosted Handle the Heavy Lifting for HortusFox

• 🐘 MariaDB without the MariaDB. The database sidecar comes pre-wired, persistent, and backed up. You never run a SQL command, never patch a database server, never argue with a my.cnf.
• 📷 Photo storage that sticks. Plant pictures land on a persistent volume in your ElfHosted tenant, so a year's worth of growth shots survives version bumps and container restarts.
• 🛡️ SSO and HTTPS in front. One ElfHosted login covers HortusFox and the rest of your apps. The household uses the same auth flow they already know rather than yet-another-password.

Frequently Asked Questions