Why Tovu Is Local-First
Most content management systems begin with an account. You sign up, you get a subdomain, and your writing lives on someone else's disk from its very first keystroke. Tovu begins with a folder.
What local-first actually means here
A Tovu site is a directory on your machine. Inside it: a SQLite database holding your posts, pages, media records and settings, and a themes folder holding real files you can open in any editor. That is the whole site. There is no hidden half living in a service you do not control.
The practical test is simple. Copy the folder to a USB stick, plug it into a different computer, and start Tovu there. You get the same site — same posts, same theme edits, same settings. Nothing needed to be re-downloaded, re-authorized, or re-synced, because nothing was ever elsewhere.
Why we chose it
Your work outlives us. If Tovu stopped being maintained tomorrow, your content would still be a readable SQLite file and your theme would still be HTML and CSS. That is a very different failure mode from a hosted service shutting down.
Editing is instant. There is no network between the editor and the database. Saves land in single-digit milliseconds because they are a local write, not a round trip.
Drafts stay private by default. An unpublished post has not been uploaded anywhere. It is a row in a file on your disk.
Version control just works. Because themes are ordinary files in an ordinary directory, git treats a Tovu site like any other project.
The honest tradeoffs
Local-first is a real choice with real costs, and we would rather name them than let you discover them later.
Backups are yours. Nobody is quietly snapshotting your database every hour. If the folder is gone and you had no copy, the site is gone.
Multi-author editing over the internet is not what this shape is naturally good at. One site, one machine, one author is the case Tovu is built around today.
Publishing to the public internet is a separate step from writing. Tovu runs your site locally; getting it in front of readers is a distinct problem, and one we are still building out.
Where we actually are
Tovu is at MVP. The editor, themes, pages, posts, media and the built-in assistant work and are what we use daily. A self-hosted version — the one where you run Tovu on your own server and point a domain at it — is planned, but it is much later on the roadmap and we are not going to pretend otherwise. See the FAQ for what that means in practice.
Local-first is not nostalgia for desktop software. It is a claim about who should hold the only copy of your writing, and the answer we keep arriving at is: you.