80+ dev tools in a 29 MB Docker container — the Swiss Army knife your server is missing

IT-Tools was born in April 2022 from the keyboard of Corentin Thomasset, a French developer tired of keeping twenty browser tabs open for online converters that tracked his every paste. The project has since crossed 40,000 GitHub stars, 5,300 forks, and 10 million Docker pulls. Its compressed image weighs 28.6 MB. The entire stack — Vue.js, TypeScript, Naive UI — runs client-side: no data ever leaves your browser.

The promise is disarmingly simple: a single docker run deploys a web page that replaces every base64 decoder, UUID generator, JSON validator, JWT parser, and subnet calculator you visit every week — with zero ads, zero trackers, and sub-millisecond latency because everything runs in your browser on your local network.

What’s inside — and what’s deliberately absent

IT-Tools bundles over 80 tools across eight categories, all reachable from a Cmd+K search bar. The interface is what sets this project apart from the pack: a clean dark-themed layout, favorites persisted in browser localStorage, and localization into nine languages.

Here are the categories and the tools you will actually use:

• Crypto — Token generator, hash text (MD5, SHA-1/256/512, SHA-3, RIPEMD160), bcrypt, UUID/ULID generator, AES/TripleDES/Rabbit/RC4 encryption, RSA key pair generator, PDF signature checker
• Converters — Base64 string and file encoder, JSON ↔ YAML ↔ TOML ↔ CSV ↔ XML, date-time converter, integer base converter (binary/hex/octal/base64), color converter (hex/rgb/hsl), case converter
• Web — URL encoder/decoder, URL parser, JWT parser, device info, HTTP status codes, MIME type lookup, Open Graph meta generator, OTP code generator, user-agent parser
• Development — Regex tester with built-in cheatsheet, cron expression parser, SQL prettifier, Git cheatsheet, JSON diff, JSON minify/prettify, Markdown to HTML, chmod calculator, Docker run to Compose converter
• Network — IPv4 subnet calculator, IPv4/IPv6 converter, MAC address lookup and generator, random port generator, IPv6 ULA generator
• Text — Lorem ipsum generator, text statistics, text diff, numeronym generator, emoji picker, string obfuscator, ASCII art text drawer, phone parser, IBAN validator
• Images — QR code generator, WiFi QR code generator, SVG placeholder generator, camera recorder
• Math — Math evaluator, ETA calculator, percentage calculator, temperature converter, benchmark builder

What is missing — and it is missing on purpose — is anything that would require a backend. IT-Tools has no authentication, no database, no server-side persistence. Your favorites live in your browser’s localStorage. If you clear your cache, you lose them. Thomasset made a deliberate trade-off: deployment simplicity over stateful features. Every tool that survived this filter works offline by definition.

One command. That’s it. No, really.

IT-Tools is arguably the most trivial Docker deployment in the self-hosting ecosystem. No environment variables. No volumes. No secrets. No database. The container runs Nginx to serve static files, and that is the entire backend story. Every computation happens in your browser via Web Workers and vanilla JavaScript.

docker run -d \
  --name it-tools \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  -p 8080:80 \
  corentinth/it-tools:latest

Docker Compose for the organized:

services:
  it-tools:
    image: corentinth/it-tools:latest
    container_name: it-tools
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8080:80"

The resource footprint is negligible: ~20 MB of RAM at idle, near-zero CPU since Nginx just hands out HTML and JavaScript. The container runs comfortably on a Raspberry Pi 4, a $150 mini PC, or a €3/month VPS. There is nothing to maintain: no database upgrades, no schema migrations, no backup schedules. The image is the application.

To expose IT-Tools behind a domain with HTTPS, put it behind any reverse proxy — Traefik, Nginx Proxy Manager, or Caddy — like any static web app. IT-Tools is also available as a one-click install on Cloudron, Tipi, and Unraid via their respective app stores.

IT-Tools vs CyberChef — same territory, opposite philosophies

The comparison with CyberChef — the data manipulation tool developed by the GCHQ, the UK’s signals intelligence agency — is unavoidable. Both projects live on the same map (encoding, hashing, encryption), but their compasses point in opposite directions.

CyberChef was designed for operation chaining: you stack « recipes » (Base64 decode → AES decrypt → inflate → render image) and the data flows through each step sequentially. It is the ideal tool for a forensic analyst or pentester dismantling a payload obfuscated five layers deep. The interface is dense, recipes are exportable, and the learning curve is real.

IT-Tools makes the opposite bet: one tool, one job. Every utility gets its own page with a purpose-built interface, explicit controls, and inline documentation. The JWT parser displays header, payload, and signature in three distinct columns. The UUID generator lets you select the version (v1, v4, v6, v7) with a single click. The regex tester highlights capture groups in real time with distinct colors.

Here is how the two projects compare:

These are not competitors — they are two tools that belong on the same shelf. If you are debugging a JWT token or generating an RSA certificate, IT-Tools is faster. If you need to extract a malicious payload buried under four layers of obfuscation, CyberChef is irreplaceable.

The use case that sells the install

Walk through a typical week for a full-stack developer running a homelab.

Monday: a JWT token expires an hour early. Open IT-Tools, paste the token, read the exp field in plain text. Tuesday: generate an RSA key pair for a new internal service. Wednesday: convert a Swagger YAML spec to JSON for CI ingestion. Thursday: calculate the subnet for a new Docker VLAN. Friday: generate a Wi-Fi QR code for a new team member.

Without IT-Tools, these five tasks mean five different websites, five distinct ad networks collecting your browsing data, five variable latencies depending on each server’s load. With IT-Tools, each task takes under thirty seconds without ever leaving your local network.

The privacy argument is equally concrete. Online converter sites — base64decode.org, jwt.io, jsonformatter.org — are data collectors like any other. They log what you paste into their text areas: IP addresses, tokens, keys, JSON payloads that sometimes contain credentials or secrets. IT-Tools eliminates this risk by design: everything runs as JavaScript in your browser, and the only network round-trip is the initial load of static files. You can verify this yourself by opening the Network tab in DevTools after the page loads: not a single packet goes out.

Verdict: install it even if you don’t « need » it

IT-Tools belongs to that rare category of self-hosted software whose entry cost is so close to zero that not installing it is a conscious choice. Twenty-nine megabytes of bandwidth, one line in your docker-compose.yml, zero maintenance — and in return, you never type « base64 decode » or « json to yaml » into a search engine again.

The verdict breaks down into three tiers:

• Beginner homelab (under 10 containers): install IT-Tools first, before even Portainer. It is the Swiss Army knife you will use every day while you build the rest of your stack.
• Solo developer on a single machine: just open it-tools.tech. Corentin Thomasset’s public instance offers the same client-side guarantee — your data never leaves your browser even on the hosted version. Self-hosting only adds network independence (offline LAN access) and availability control.
• Development team behind a VPN: deploy IT-Tools on the internal server. It is the quintessential shared tool — no accounts, no permissions, just a URL everyone knows that always works.

IT-Tools does not replace anything — it removes friction. The day you type « base64 decode » into your URL bar and land on your own instance instead of an ad-infested site, you have won.

References

• IT-Tools — Official Site — public instance maintained by Corentin Thomasset
• IT-Tools GitHub Repository — 40k stars, GPLv3
• IT-Tools Docker Hub — 28.6 MB, 10M+ pulls
• IT-Tools — selfhosting.sh Setup Guide — updated February 2026
• IT-Tools on Noted — review by Jeremy, March 2023
• CyberChef — GCHQ — data manipulation tool
• Corentin Thomasset — Personal Site