One container and no .env file

mcpHomeManager is a self-hosted MCP gateway for homelab services, one place where your agents reach the apps you run at home. For a homelab tool I cared most about the first run.

Until March the docs described “the real stack (Litestar, PostgreSQL…)”. On 10 March SQLite became “the zero-config default database”, with “one container, one volume, instant startup”. Postgres moved to an optional extra compose file.

The same day the entrypoint script went. Python builds the database URL and generates and stores the encryption key itself, so there is nothing to fill in before the first start.

Type checking went the other way. mypy was removed as unused, then brought back and added to CI. With the blanket ignore gone, it turned out mypy “was silently treating all framework types as Any”, and it “exposed one real bug”.

Then I measured the frontend. The Inter font (344 KB) became Plus Jakarta Sans (48 KB), and recharts (333 KB and 37 packages) became one custom SVG chart.

One MCP detail: clients “cache the tool list at startup”, so the gateway’s instructions to the agent include hints to restart the client when tools change.