Run one container
docker compose up -d on anything with Docker — a home lab, a Pi, a $5 VPS. Migrations run themselves.
Self-hosted · Members free · iPhone app
Run your own Night Watch.
A private movie-club room for you and your friends, on your own server. Rank the shelf, book the night, save a seat, get the reminder. Nobody else's cloud.
Invite the Watch
Share the club password. Friends pick a name, upload a face, and rank the shelf. You're the host; they're the Watch.
Open The Common Room
The iPhone app adds your room by address, signs in, and pushes reminders straight from your server.
What's inside
Built for a weekly club, not a watch-party app.
Ten friends, one couch, a shelf of sagas to get through. Everything here exists because a real club needed it.
The shelf
Trilogies and sagas with posters, runtimes, and IMDb scores. Ranked-choice runoff decides what plays next — no more group-chat stalemate.
Nights
A real calendar. One-tap RSVP, host attendance, split long films across two nights, .ics / webcal / RSS feeds so it lands in everyone’s phone.
Politics
Movies, days, and snacks each get a ballot. The lobby shows who’s winning and who still owes the club a vote.
Push that shows up
Scheduled, changed, cancelled, plus reminders at each member’s lead times. Sent by your server, straight to The Common Room app.
Specs
Your theater gear and each file’s codec, bitrate, and audio format — with hover explainers your friends will pretend to read.
Yours, entirely
SQLite on your disk. A backup is a folder. No telemetry, no accounts with us, and the license key is checked offline.
The Charter
Members free. Hosts buy the Charter.
Every new room runs a 14-day Squire trial. After that the host enters a Charter key and the room is theirs. One key per room.
Squire
Free 14 days
The whole room, every feature, no card. Two gatherings is enough to know.
Start hostingKnight's Charter
$24 per year
One room, one year. Renew when it lapses — nothing is deleted.
Lifetime Charter
$59 once
One room, forever. Every update, no renewals.
Hosting
Five minutes, one file.
Paste this into docker-compose.yml, set two secrets, and you have a room. Full guide, reachability options, and upgrades live in the docs.
services:
night-watch:
image: ghcr.io/trevlars/the-night-watch:latest
restart: unless-stopped
ports: ["3080:3000"]
environment:
CLUB_PASSWORD: pick-an-invite-code
ADMIN_PASSWORD: pick-a-host-password
ADMIN_NAMES: Your Name
SESSION_SECRET: "${SESSION_SECRET}" # openssl rand -hex 32
SITE_URL: https://watch.example.com # the https address friends will use
volumes:
- night-watch-data:/data
volumes:
night-watch-data:Questions
Straight answers.
- Do my friends pay?
- No. Members never see anything commercial. The host carries the room the way the host carries the projector.
- What happens when the trial ends?
- After 14 days members are paused (they can still read everything) and the host sees the Charter desk. Nothing is deleted. Enter a key and the hall relights.
- Does the key phone home?
- No. A Charter is an Ed25519-signed key your own server verifies offline. Push notifications are the only thing that leaves your server, and only to reach Apple.
- What do I need to host it?
- Anything that runs Docker — a Proxmox box, Unraid, a Raspberry Pi 4, or a $5 VPS — and an https address friends can reach (Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale Funnel work without opening ports).
- Is the source available?
- Yes, under the Elastic License 2.0: run it anywhere, read it, change it. You just can’t resell it as a hosted service or strip the Charter.
- Other kinds of clubs?
- The Night Watch is the first The Common Room society. Board games, video games, and mystery books are next — same app, sibling rooms.