Track Your Media, Your Way: Meet Ryot

Ever find yourself jumping between Goodreads, Letterboxd, and a dozen other apps just to remember what you've read, watched, or played? It gets fragmented fast. What if you could bring all that tracking under one roof, on your own terms, without handing your data over to another platform?

That's the itch Ryot scratches. It's a self-hosted, open-source tracker for your books, movies, TV shows, and video games. Think of it as a unified, private dashboard for your personal media consumption, living on a server you control.

What It Does

Ryot is a web application you host yourself. Once it's up and running, you can start logging the media you interact with. You can mark items as in progress, rate them, review them, and organize them into custom lists. It pulls in metadata (like cover art, descriptions, and genres) from public APIs, so your library feels rich and informative without you having to manually enter every detail.

Why It's Cool

The appeal here is in the combination of consolidation and control.

• One Dashboard to Rule Them All: No more context switching between services. Your bookshelf sits next to your game library and your watchlist. This unified view can reveal interesting patterns in your habits that you'd miss when everything is siloed.
• You Own Your Data: This is the big one for the privacy-conscious and the self-hoster. Your reading history, your hot-takes on movies, your abandoned game log—it all stays on your server. You can back it up, migrate it, or export it.
• It's a Polished Project: A quick look at the GitHub repo shows a well-considered tech stack (Next.js, TRPC, Prisma) and an active commit history. The UI, as seen in the screenshots, is clean and modern. This isn't a weekend prototype; it's a tool built to be used.
• Flexible and Developer-Friendly: Being open-source means you can tweak it. Want to add a new media type, modify the schema, or change how data is fetched? You can. It's a solid foundation you can build upon if you have specific needs.

How to Try It

The easiest way to get a feel for Ryot is to check out the project on GitHub. The repository has a comprehensive README with all the details.

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/IgnisDa/ryot

For a quick, no-commitment look, the repo often links to a live demo (if one is available). To run it yourself, you'll need Docker and Docker Compose. The setup is standard for modern self-hosted apps: clone the repo, configure an environment file with your database details and API keys (for services like TMDB and IGDB), and run docker-compose up. The documentation walks you through it.

Final Thoughts

As a developer, I appreciate tools that solve a personal pain point while respecting my autonomy. Ryot does exactly that. It's for anyone who is tired of platform lock-in and wants a long-term, portable home for their media history. Whether you're a data hoarder, a privacy advocate, or just someone who likes having a neat personal catalog, Ryot is worth a spin. It turns the simple act of tracking what you enjoy into a owned, consolidated, and much more interesting dataset.

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