Introducing Thingport: a self-hosted home for your 3D models

If you do 3D printing, you probably find models all over the place: MakerWorld, Printables, Thingiverse and a few others. Over time the bookmarks, downloaded ZIPs and random folders become a mess, and the model you want never seems to be where you left it.

Thingport is a personal, self-hosted library for those models. It keeps a real copy of every model you care about, with its files, photos, description, author and a link back to where it came from, all on a server you control.

What it does today

• Imports from the sites you use. Paste a MakerWorld, Printables or Thingiverse link, or import whole collections and your likes at once.
• Previews models in 3D. STL, 3MF, STEP and OBJ files open in an interactive viewer right in the browser.
• Keeps things organized. Nested categories, collections, tags, favourites and full-text search.
• Gets you to the printer. Attach instructions and sliced prints to a model, and open files straight in Bambu Studio, PrusaSlicer or Cura.
• Stores plain files. Your models are ordinary files on your disk, in a folder layout you choose.

There’s a longer tour on the features page.

Two companion apps

Thingport Grab is a browser extension that adds an import button to MakerWorld, Printables and Thingiverse model pages, so you can save a model without leaving the page you found it on.

Thingport Bridge is a small desktop helper that makes “Open in slicer” work for slicers that won’t accept a link from a self-hosted server.

Try it

Thingport runs from pre-built Docker images, so it works on almost anything, from a spare laptop to a NAS. The install guide takes you from nothing to a running instance with docker compose up -d. There are also guides for Unraid, TrueNAS SCALE and CasaOS.

Thingport is free and open source under the MIT license. If you run into a problem or have an idea, open an issue on GitHub. Pull requests are welcome too.