Colophon #

Spanner is an indie vehicle maintenance tool built and maintained by @nicinabox since 2014. It has been crafted with consideration for ease of use, speed, and low cost. The project is open source, privacy-minded, and self-hostable.

It's designed for use with a wide range of vehicles including cars, motorcycles, race bikes, tractors, and boats (even a helicopter mechanic was consulted) in both imperial and metric units.

Spanner works on the web, on desktop or mobile, and can be installed on your device as a progressive web app (PWA).

Technical #

The frontend stack is built on Sveltekit with Typescript. Styling is done with Tailwind and the design is handcrafted. Zag is used for stateful component logic and accessibilty. Icons are from Lucide. Font is Inter.

Backend is Ruby on Rails using Postgres as the database.

Hosting #

Currently hosted on Railway with autodeploys from GitHub. Attachments are stored in a private S3-compatible bucket. Transactional email is delivered by Postmark.

You can self-host your own using Docker.

Feature Philosophy #

Spanner focuses on a core feature set for hobbyists and regular folks who have busy lives. It is not a shop inventory tracker, fuel tracker, or project planner. It is recommended to use purpose-built tools if you need these features.