Hoodie enables you to express yourself through technology by making web application development very fast, easy and accessible.
Hoodie is a free and Open Source Software for building applications for the web and iOS. It is a complete backend for your apps, ready for you to get creative. It works immediately out-of-the-box: develop your frontend code, plug it into Hoodie’s frontend-friendly API and your app is ready.
When you develop it, your app runs locally first, you can then deploy and host it wherever you want to. And if you want to extend Hoodie’s core features, you can check our list of currently available plugins or build plugins yourself.
Hoodie is a noBackend technology — it's there for making the lives of frontend developers easier by abstracting away the backend and keeping you from worrying about backends. It gives you Dreamcode: a simple, easy-to-learn-and-implement frontend API built into it. Hoodie is also Offline First, which means that your app users’ data is stored locally by default so your Hoodie-based apps are accessible and usable anytime, independent from your users’ internet connection.
Hoodie exists to empower you and make web development easier and more accessible to a wider range of people. It relies relies on strong values like diversity, empowerment and decentralisation. Hoodie is built by an amazing and dedicated community consisting of developers and non-coding experts.
Hoodie is your tool for building frontend-heavy applications for the web and iOS really quickly. It gives you a compact API which has built-in features: user signup and administration, data storage, loading, shares, synchronisation and sending emails. With Hoodie, all you do when building an app is: you just develop the frontend code, hook it up to Hoodie’s frontend API, and your app is ready. Hoodie can be used for building applications for the web and iOS.
If Hoodie’s core features aren’t enough for you, you can extend Hoodie with plugins, so you can make Hoodie fit your needs exactly. See all our currently available plugins here and out how to build a plugin yourself in this tutorial.
At the moment, Hoodie is mainly for frontend developers who want to build their own applications based on it and for Node.js developers who want to help us extend Hoodie’s core by building plugins.
Hoodie’s vision and future goal is to be accessible for designers and people with few coding skills because we think this matters.
If you want your Hoodie-based applications to not just run locally, you can deploy them. Find all details on how to do this in this tutorial. (Oh yes, unfortunately, deployments aren't really easy yet. We're working on making this much more smooth than it's now. If you want to help us with this, please get in touch with us!)
Hoodie is Offline First. Thus, your application users’ data is stored locally and accessible regardless of internet connection. It’s a noBackend architecture which means that you who build something on it don’t have to worry about backends, and its API is written in Dreamcode so that frontend developers can easily understand it.
Hoodie is written in JavaScript and built based on CouchDB and Node.js. All parts of Hoodie work together smoothly to create a seamless, consistent user experience for your applications’ users.
Hoodie would not exist without the wonderful people who build it, improve it, extend it, spread the word about it and support it. We’re a small, but growing community, and we’re very happy if you want to help us. Join us!
There are already various applications based on Hoodie. Some of them are prototypes or work in progress, others are already finished, and most of them are Open Source. Feel free to try them out or contribute to them, if you want to!







We also built a few handy tools to manage our work on Hoodie and keep track of it and which may be of interest for your project as well, — take a look at Milestones and Ubersicht!