Personal inventory management software
I'm looking to better organize all the computer and electronics parts I have laying around and am looking for recommendations for software from people who are already doing this. I saw InvenTree but wasn't sure if there are other alternatives I should look at. Most of what I found so far is focused on companies and is therefore a bit more than I need. My only major requirement is that I can self-host it, or at least easily export all my data out of it. Ideally, the same software would work well for organizing home workshop parts as well (e.g. bolts, sockets, glues), though that's not a hard requirement.
Also, I'm not sure if this makes more sense here or in ~hobbies, but I figured the computer/electronics focus means it makes more sense here.
Grocy. It's an ERP system for your home.
Inventory your stockpile. Setup barcode scanning for adding/removing stock.
Store your important manuals,have a calendar for all your maintainence tasks.
It's incredibly powerful and I highly reccomend if you have the time and ability to focus enough to see it through and keep up with it.
I saw this when looking before, but thought it was focused on groceries. Though looking at it again, I see it supports custom items, so that may work for my needs. I hadn't thought about storing manuals before, but that seems useful as well.
Grocy doesn't know what anything is OOTB, you define all the types and units you want.
My gut reaction was a simple Excel sheet, but I'm wondering what kind of features you're looking for? Qr/bar codes etc?
Bar code scanning could be cool, but I'm not sure I'd use it. I would like to be able to search for items at least somewhat easily, so I'm not sure Excel would support that well. My main concern would be needing to either keep an Excel license/subscription or stick to features that LibreOffice supports.
Literally every barcode scanner I've ever seen simply dumps the resulting scan as if it were a keyboard, followed by "return". Barcode scanners are dead simple things and should work with everything, more or less.
data validation and a vlookup is easy for searching.
you can use a barcode scanner with anything that takes text input. just make sure it has a CR or LF character at the end so it carries down to the next row automatically.
but yeah, i’m also pro-spreadsheet. have your columns as category, subcat, item, description, etc — just make sure every line has your categories and stuff for quick filtering down if you want to.
Hail and well met fellow tech nerd!
Unfortunately I have a rather unsophisticated approach to inventory management - I have Google docs with typed lists and referenced to physical location / what drawer, etc... It's not ideal and a SQL database of some sort would likely be better, but when I'm trying to figure out 'do I already have one of these?' I can just search for it in Google docs, so it works acceptably for my purposes.
A video I would recommend to you, which has a ton of adjacent knowledge to implementing inventory, is this video from David Malawey about how he does a lot of things regarding materials / organization / labeling etc... Thought it is not explicitly the subject of the video, he shows a lot of his inventory and how he manages it in the video and it may give you useful ideas.
That video was very interesting! I'll send that to a few other people I know who may be interested. The part about using a grid for keys makes me think about an idea I had to organize things not by related groups, but just in a grid of containers. Then I could have some database sort of thing that knows what bin they are in. At least for me, I wouldn't really mind if, for example, M5 bolts and capacitors are in the same container (assuming they are in separate sections of the container) as long as I can easily look up what that bin is.
Highly recommend gridfinity. I really appreciate the amount of custom boxes people have come up with.
This might not exactly fit your use case but it's an easily self hosted inventory management system intended for tracking things in your home.
https://github.com/sysadminsmedia/homebox
That looks close to what I'm wanting, so I'll definitely check it out. Even if I don't use it for this specific use, I may try it out for the general items I own, since it also seems to track manuals as well.
If it's for your use alone, and if you have (or are interested in picking up) basic scripting skill with something like Python, then SQLite works great.
That was actually one of the first approaches I considered (and have definitely not ruled out). It seems like an easy enough problem to either use some basic Flask/Django app for or to try out one of the Rust web frameworks I've been needing a project for. And SQLite makes projects like these simple.
Honestly, it might be easier to simply use something like LibreOffice Base or Microsoft Access. The former is better than the latter in my experience, and you can more or less connect it to any relational database that supports ODBC or JDBC (though for this use I would strongly recommend the default embedded HSQLDB). Why bother writing a whole project to access your data when you could just drag and drop it and get it over with?
I had no idea LibreOffice Base existed until your comment. I'm going to look into that more. Even if it turns out to be limiting in some way, it could help find out what features a more specific tool would need.
For sure. The nice thing about SQL databases is that it's fairly easy to port data between them.
Constraints, views, and other vendor-specific capabilities are another story, of course.
Yeah, as long as you keep your underlying data well structured, you're in an easy place to migrate if your home grown sometime every becomes too troublesome to maintain.
Part-DB is what I use for this.
But honestly, try a bunch of them and see what sticks. It's a very "use what fits your brain" category IMO, because it's so easy to stop using it out of laziness and then it's suddenly out of sync with reality and useless.
I think you're right about just trying them and seeing what works. And I definitely agree with needing to find what I can stick to using, since this is really a case where it's only useful if I consistently track things.
Inventory management is my "white whale" for a selfhosted application. I was going to suggest checking the status of Homebox, created by the author of Mealie, but it looks like the project has been archived on GitHub.
I was going to build my own at one point, but gave up pretty quickly for a variety of reasons. The key feature I wanted was basically nested locations. An example: my Steam Deck is in my drawer, in my main desk, in my office, in my home.
I've basically settled on just having offline (non-digital) organization. If I'm looking for a USB-C cable, wading through a small container dedicated to USB-C cables and adapters is sufficient, and maybe even better, because I will see more of the related items without looking anything up.
I do keep digital records of warranty info, etc for applicable products, but that really is just organizing digital files and not inventorying their associated physical objects.
Another comment linked to a continuation of homebox.
I have those 2 tools in my notes for this use, you might want to have a look:
https://www.thingybase.com/
https://www.boxorganizer.app/
Snipe-IT may be a little bit overkill, but should do what you’re looking for and more. This may fall into the “software for companies” category you were talking about, but it’s what I thought of immediately based on your request.
https://snipeitapp.com