Privacy

What Noust sends off a server (nothing about you), the one request it makes unasked, and how to check it.

Explanation Updated 29 October 2026 View as Markdown

Noust does not tell anyone anything about your server. This page says exactly what that means, which requests Noust does make and why, and how you can check each claim yourself instead of taking it on trust.

The promise

No telemetry. No usage statistics, no counters, no feature flags fetched from a service, no licence check, no identifier of the installation or of you. The project runs no server that an installation reports to, so there is nothing to opt out of.
No error reporting to a third party. A crash, a failed deploy or an exception is written to your journal and your audit trail and goes nowhere else. noust support report builds a report on your server, masks secrets, and prints it to you; it sends nothing. Sending it is your decision.
No third-party code in the console. The browser console loads its scripts, styles and fonts from your own server (default-src 'self'; connect, image and font sources are 'self' too, see the browser). It embeds no analytics, no tag manager, no CDN.
No dependency whose purpose is to report. A Sentry, PostHog, Segment, OpenTelemetry or similar library is not part of Noust and the build refuses one.

The one request Noust makes without being told where

The update check. It is how the CLI's banner, noust health, GET /api/system/version, Settings > About and the fleet's "target version" know that a newer release exists.

It reads	From	Because
The newest version this installation can install	The package repository it upgrades from (apt, dnf or zypper repository on `download.opensuse.org`, or `pypi.org` for pip)	An update is only announced once your package manager can install it
The newest published release, and recent releases to spot a security one	`api.github.com` (`/repos/Perkybeet/noust/releases`)	To tell "on the way" from "not released"
The release notes of a version, before you update to it	The same GitHub release	Settings > About Noust shows them before you decide

What leaves your server: the request itself. The destination sees your server's IP address, as any request shows it, and a User-Agent of noust-update-check. There is no version, no host name, no cookie and no identifier in it, and the answer is cached for five minutes.

Turn it off with noust config set updates.check false, or updates.check: false in the configuration file. Off means the request is never made: no thread, no cache read, no banner. The version endpoint then answers disabled, and the console does not claim to be up to date.

Requests you ask for

Everything else Noust sends goes to an address you configured or typed, for the purpose you configured it for. Each carries User-Agent: noust/<version> (the version of the program, no more), except where the other end is yours and needs nothing.

Kind	Where it goes	When
Notifications	The webhook, Slack, Discord, Teams, Mattermost, Matrix, Lark, PagerDuty, ntfy, Telegram, Pushover, Gotify or email server of a channel you added, or the email service it sends through (Resend, Postmark, Brevo, Amazon SES)	An event you routed to that channel happens
Log shipping, audit shipping	The syslog or HTTP destination you configured	Continuously, once you configure one
Backup destinations	The destination you configured, which `rclone` reaches (S3-compatible storage, B2, SFTP, SMB, WebDAV and the rest of its backends)	When a backup runs or you test the destination
Git and registries	The repositories and registries your applications deploy from, as the account you connected	When you deploy, update or browse a repository
DNS and certificates	The DNS provider's API with your token (Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Gandi or Route 53), the DNS resolvers you check against, Let's Encrypt (through certbot)	When you add a domain or a certificate renews
Secret managers	The Vault, Infisical or Doppler server you registered	When an application using its secrets deploys
Single sign-on	The identity provider or the directory (LDAP, Active Directory) you set up	When someone signs in through it, or it provisions accounts
Probes	The addresses you asked to probe from outside an application	At the interval of each probe
Cloud providers	The Hetzner, DigitalOcean or Vultr API with the token you gave	When you provision or list servers
Import	The Coolify or Dokploy server you named, with the read-only token you typed once	When you import
Cloudflare's address ranges	`www.cloudflare.com`	Only when you press refresh on the trusted proxies
A remote console	The Noust server named by `--context`	When you run a command against it
Your own applications	This machine, to check a port or a health path	Every deploy; the monitor's reachability scan
Your fleet	Each node, through an SSH tunnel that ends on that node's loopback	While a central manages nodes

Programs that Noust runs for you keep their own policies, and Noust gives them nothing to identify you with: git talks to your Git host, certbot to Let's Encrypt (which receives the contact email you gave it, as its terms require), apt/dnf to your distribution's mirrors, npm, pip, bun or docker to the registries your application's dependencies come from. Those are the work you asked for, not reports about it.

How to check it

You do not need to believe this page.

Read the test that holds it. tests/test_privacy.py is the inventory: every module of Noust that can open an outbound connection, the address it talks to, and why. It fails when someone adds a telemetry or error-reporting library to the code or to the package's dependencies, when a module starts opening connections without being declared, when a new place reads the release information without being gated by updates.check, and when the update check sends anything but its fixed User-Agent. A change that adds a way out has to say so in that file, where a reviewer reads it.
Block the network. Noust works with outbound traffic denied except what you use. With updates.check false and a firewall that only allows your Git host, your DNS and Let's Encrypt, the only thing that stops is the update banner.
Watch it. ss -tnp and your firewall's logs show which connections a noust or noust-web process opens; the table above is the complete list of what you will see.
Read the code. Noust is AGPL-3.0 and src/noust is the whole program.

What stays on your server

Your configuration, secrets, audit trail, application files, metrics history and backups live under /etc/noust, /var/lib/noust, /var/backups/noust and /var/log/noust. Secrets are written 0600, redacted when printed, and never put on a command line. A central that manages other servers keeps its secrets sealed with a passphrase it never stores (see CENTRAL.md). Removing the package leaves your applications running and removes nothing of yours; purging it on Debian or Ubuntu deletes the configuration and the audit trail under /etc/noust and the logs in /var/log/noust, and nothing else (concepts.md).

Changing this page

This is a promise about the program, so a change to what leaves a server is a change to this page and to tests/test_privacy.py, in the same commit. If you find a request that is not described here, that is a bug: report it.