wtf is android-home-server?

This project is a guide and set of scripts for turning an old, rooted Android phone into an always-on home server you can reach from anywhere on the internet. The idea is that an unused phone already has many things a small server needs: it uses little power, has a built-in battery that acts like a backup power supply, and runs quietly, so instead of buying a small cloud server you repurpose the phone sitting in a drawer. The guide walks you through installing a full Ubuntu Linux system inside the phone using a technique called chroot, which runs Linux alongside Android without flashing a new operating system onto the device. Once set up, the phone can run an SSH server so you can connect to it from your home network, and it can also be reached securely from anywhere using Cloudflare Tunnel, which avoids the need to open ports on your router or have a fixed internet address. A web based file manager called filebrowser lets you upload and download files from any browser, and an optional Telegram bot sends notifications about battery level and whether the server is online. A watchdog script keeps everything running and restarts services automatically if the phone reboots. Setup requires a rooted Android phone, ideally a spare one since rooting carries some risk of data loss, along with the Termux terminal app and an SD card to hold the Linux files. Reaching the server from the internet needs a free Cloudflare account and a domain name you control. The step by step instructions are provided in both English and Turkish, and cover everything from rooting and formatting the SD card through configuring the system, setting up the tunnel, and enabling auto start on boot. The repository also includes an optional skill file meant for use with AI coding assistants like Claude Code, which explains this specific setup's quirks, such as the lack of a standard systemd init system, so that apps built later on the server keep running after a reboot. The project is released under the MIT license, so it can be freely used, modified, and shared.