Self-hosting on Cloudflare

Rowflare runs entirely inside your own Cloudflare account. Each base is one SQLite-backed Durable Object; a Worker serves the app and the REST API; D1 stores accounts and workspaces; R2 stores attachments.

If you would rather run it on your own server, use the Docker image instead. It needs no Cloudflare account.

Requirement: Workers Paid plan ($5/month)

On Cloudflare, Rowflare needs the Workers Paid plan, which costs $5/month per Cloudflare account and covers the whole team, with unlimited users.

The free plan is not enough for a real team:

• It allows 10 ms of CPU per request. A filter or sort on a 50,000-row base takes 74-80 ms inside the Durable Object.
• It allows 5 million SQLite rows read per day. One filter on a 50,000-row base reads 50,000 rows, so roughly 100 filters a day use up the quota.

The Paid plan includes 25 billion rows read per month.

One-click deploy

1. Open the deploy link: https://deploy.workers.cloudflare.com/?url=https://github.com/rowflare/rowflare
2. Sign in to Cloudflare. Cloudflare copies the repository into your GitHub or GitLab account and builds it.
3. Confirm the proposed resource names (the defaults are fine).
4. Open the URL shown when the deploy finishes, for example https://rowflare.your-subdomain.workers.dev.
5. Sign up right away. The first user to sign up becomes the owner of the instance. After that, other people join by invite.

What the button creates

Settings (environment variables)

Set these in the Cloudflare dashboard (your Worker, Settings, Variables and Secrets) or in wrangler.jsonc. Store keys and passwords as secrets.

System email (optional)

Automations can send email through Cloudflare Email Service without any setup by workspace owners. Add a send_email binding named EMAIL to wrangler.jsonc and set EMAIL_FROM:

"send_email": [{ "name": "EMAIL" }]

The sender domain must be onboarded to Cloudflare Email Service, which is in Beta and needs the Workers Paid plan. In cloud mode each workspace can send 100 system emails a day. Without the binding, workspace owners can still set up Resend or SMTP under Settings, Email sending.

Account emails (optional)

With a way to send email, Rowflare mails a link to confirm the address after sign-up (the app shows “Check your inbox to confirm your email” with “Send again” until it is confirmed; unconfirmed accounts work normally) and offers “Forgot password?” on the login page. Reset links work for one hour and sign out the account’s other sessions; confirmation links work for 24 hours. An address gets at most 5 of these emails an hour, and “Forgot password?” answers the same whether or not an account exists.

Rowflare uses the first of these that is set up: the EMAIL binding with EMAIL_FROM (Cloudflare Email Service, as above), MAIL_PROVIDER=resend with RESEND_API_KEY and MAIL_FROM, or MAIL_PROVIDER=smtp with the SMTP_* settings and MAIL_FROM. Without any of them, the links are not offered and the “Forgot password?” page asks people to contact whoever runs the instance. Accounts that existed before this feature count as confirmed.

Sign in with an email code instead of passwords (optional)

With AUTH_EMAIL=code and one of the account email setups above, people sign in by typing their email and the 6-digit code Rowflare mails to it. There are no passwords: sign-up and log-in are the same page, and the account (with its first workspace) is created when the first code is entered. Codes work once, for 10 minutes, with at most 5 wrong tries; an address gets at most 5 codes an hour, one network address at most 10, and the instance at most 1,000; the page answers the same whether or not an account exists or a limit was reached. Password sign-up, log-in, “Forgot password?” and the password section of Settings are turned off. Without account email the setting has no effect and the instance keeps passwords. Accounts that already have a password sign in with a code from then on.

These settings are only for account emails; automations’ email steps use the mail settings each workspace owner saves under Settings, Email sending.

AI services (optional)

Workspace owners add AI services under Settings, AI services: Anthropic, or any OpenAI-compatible service with its address and model (OpenAI, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, Zhipu, OpenRouter, Gemini, Ollama). This needs SECRET_KEY. Calls are billed to the owner’s own key.

To also offer Workers AI without a key, add the binding to wrangler.jsonc; calls are billed to the Cloudflare account that runs Rowflare, so consider AI_WORKERS_MONTHLY_CALLS:

"ai": { "binding": "AI" }

The binding is left out of the default configuration because wrangler dev and the tests would then need a Cloudflare login.

Manual deploy

git clone https://github.com/rowflare/rowflare.git
cd rowflare
npm install
npx wrangler login
npm run deploy

npm run deploy builds the web app and deploys the Worker with its Durable Object, D1, R2 and cron bindings. Wrangler creates the D1 database and R2 bucket on the first deploy, and the Worker creates its D1 tables on the first request, so there is no separate migration step.

Docker

The Docker image runs the same Worker code as the Cloudflare deploy, in workerd (Cloudflare’s open-source Workers runtime) through Miniflare. Durable Objects, D1 and R2 are stored as SQLite databases and files under /data, so mount a volume there.

docker run -d --name rowflare \
  -p 8787:8787 \
  -v rowflare-data:/data \
  -e APP_URL=https://rowflare.example.com \
  ghcr.io/rowflare/rowflare:latest

The same image is on Docker Hub as rowflare/rowflare.

Or with Docker Compose, using the docker-compose.yml in the repository:

docker compose up -d

Open http://your-server:8787 and sign up right away: the first user becomes the owner. Put a reverse proxy with HTTPS in front of it (Caddy, nginx, Traefik) for anything beyond a local network, and forward WebSocket upgrades on /api/bases/*/ws for real-time collaboration.

Images are published for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64. Tags: latest (main branch), 1.2.3 and 1.2 for releases, and sha-<commit>.

The settings below are passed as environment variables (-e MODE=selfhost). The container also reads:

To build the image yourself: docker build -t rowflare ., or docker compose up -d --build.

Automations and AI fields run in the container the same way as on Cloudflare. System email (Cloudflare Email Service) and Workers AI are not available there; Resend, SMTP and own-key AI services work (for account emails, pass MAIL_PROVIDER and its settings), so pass -e SECRET_KEY=... to let workspace owners save their credentials. To use an Ollama on the same machine or network, also pass -e AUTOMATION_ALLOW_PRIVATE=true.

The hourly maintenance job runs inside the container. Differences from Cloudflare: everything runs on one machine, so capacity is limited by that machine’s CPU and disk, and there are no D1 Time Travel restores (see backups below).

Updating

Pull the latest code and deploy again:

git pull
npm install
npm run deploy

If you deployed with the button, sync your fork with the upstream repository and Workers Builds deploys the new commit.

With Docker, pull the new image and recreate the container; the data volume is kept:

docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

Backups

• D1 Time Travel restores the accounts database to any point in the last 30 days on the Paid plan (npx wrangler d1 time-travel).
• Export each base as CSV (per table) or JSON (whole base) and keep the files outside Cloudflare.
• Attachments live in your R2 bucket; copy it with any S3-compatible tool for an off-site copy.
• With Docker, everything is in the /data volume. Stop the container and copy the volume, or snapshot the disk it lives on.

Costs on Cloudflare

Included in the $5/month Workers Paid plan (prices checked 2026-10-12):

Sources: Durable Objects pricing, Workers pricing.

Worked example (estimate): 2,000 filters or sorts a day on a 50,000-row base read about 3 billion rows a month, inside the 25 billion included. 100 full formula recomputes a month write about 5 million rows, inside the 50 million included. That team pays $5/month. The included amounts are shared across your whole Cloudflare account; your bill is the source of truth.

Performance

Median milliseconds inside the Durable Object, test data with 15 fields and about 678 bytes per row, measured 2026-10-12: