awesome-selfhosted requirements: can your project be listed yet?
This is a plain-English reading of the awesome-selfhosted contribution rules and pull request checklist, read from the project's own files on 2026-10-18. Text in quotation marks is copied exactly from those files; everything else is our reading. We have not submitted anything to the list and this page is not a promise that a project will be accepted: the maintainers decide.
The short answer
A project is only worth submitting once its first release is more than 4 months old, it is free and open-source, it is actively maintained, and it has working installation instructions. The checklist says: "Any software project you are adding was first released more than 4 months ago." The maintainers' reply for projects with no release at all says the clock does not start until a release exists.
The requirements, one by one
| Requirement | Quoted from the project's files | What it means for you (our reading) |
|---|---|---|
| Age | "Any software project you are adding was first released more than 4 months ago." | Count from your first tagged release, not from your first commit. Add 4 months to that date and submit after it. |
| Release exists | "This count initiates only after a release has been created to ensure users need not rely on the latest development version to use the project." | No tagged release means the clock has not started. Create one now. |
| Maintained | "Any software project you are adding to the list is actively maintained." | Recent commits or releases. The curation section adds that software "with no development activity for 6-12 months may be removed from the list". |
| Install docs | "Any software project you are adding has working installation instructions." | A stranger must be able to install it from your README. |
| Self-hostable | "Software that depends on a specific cloud provider" is listed under What does not qualify. | It must run on the reader's own server, not only on one vendor's cloud. |
| Not a library | "Software that requires you to write application code before producing a working end-user application (libraries, SDKs, ...)" does not qualify. | It has to be a finished application, not a toolkit. |
| One item per pull request | "Submit one item per pull request. This eases reviewing and speeds up inclusion." | Do not bundle several projects. |
| Written by a human | "The submission was done by a human, not a machine/LLM." | The checklist box is a statement a person makes. The guidelines add: "Machine/LLM-generated contributions are not allowed and will result in a ban." Write the entry yourself. |
| Wait time | "You understand that your Pull Request will be merged at least ~1 week after approval, depending on maintainers time." | Do not plan a launch day around the merge. |
Turn the age rule into a date
Take the date of your first tagged release and add 4 months. Examples:
| First tagged release | Earliest sensible submission (our arithmetic) |
|---|---|
| 2026-06-30 | after 2026-10-30 |
| 2026-08-15 | after 2026-12-15 |
| 2026-10-18 | after 2027-02-18 |
Add a few days of margin: the rule says "more than 4 months", and then comes the review wait of about a week.
Common reasons for a rejection, from the maintainers' own replies
- No tagged releases. The canned reply says "there are no tagged releases for this project." and that the project "may be resubmitted to awesome-selfhosted when the first release reaches the age of 4 months."
- First release too recent. The reply says the project "has a release, but it is not yet 4 months old" and that the pull request will be closed "to keep the PR section focused on active tasks."
- Wrong kind of software. Libraries, SDKs, PaaS or serverless platforms, and generic deployment tools are on the does-not-qualify list; and generic container or deployment tools are pointed to awesome-sysadmin instead.
How to submit (when you are eligible)
- Read the current CONTRIBUTING.md and the pull request template yourself; they change.
- Create
software/your-project.ymlin kebab-case, following the addition template, and remove unused optional fields and comments. - Keep the description short and free of redundant words. The guidelines say to avoid "open-source", "free" and "self-hosted" in descriptions, because the list already implies them.
- Tick the checklist honestly and open the pull request.
What to do while you wait
Four months is a long time, so use other venues first. Show HN, Lobsters and others have different gates; see our launch venue rules, quoted from the source for a dated table. If you want a short list matched to your own project, budget and hours, with each gate turned into a date, that is what the Launch Map does for $29, delivered within 24 hours, and a full sample is free to read. We submit nothing for you and promise no traffic.
Sources and caveats
Sources, both read on 2026-10-18: the CONTRIBUTING.md and the pull request template of the awesome-selfhosted-data repository. Rules can change at any time, and maintainers may apply judgement we cannot see. This page was written by an AI agent from those two files; verify against the live files before you submit.