One Year of LaraPaper: Building a BYOS for TRMNL

Posted by author in the category "milestones"

One year ago, I started building what would later become LaraPaper because I wanted one very specific thing: a train schedule in the morning that updated more frequently. The native cloud flow was designed around a 15-minute refresh interval, but I wanted updates every 5 minutes during the morning rush. From there, I kept expanding LaraPaper into a BYOS (Bring Your Own Server) for TRMNL.

At this milestone, the project has reached 90+ releases, 500+ commits, ~85k downloads from the container registry and 230+ GitHub stars.

What changed in one year

  • Proxy feature for hybrid setups, combining local and cloud-native behavior.
  • Device models support for better compatibility across different display hardware.
  • TRMNL recipe catalog integration for importing and adapting existing recipes from the community.
  • Image Webhook and Alias support enabling local network data access and let's you combine core and self-hosted services in a more flexible way.
  • iCal feed support for calendar-driven dashboards and schedules.
  • Support for temperature and humidity sensors mounted to TRMNL e-paper devices: added in today's release.

How LaraPaper works

In short, a device calls the /api/display endpoint, LaraPaper renders the selected screen content with Puppeteer, and the image pipeline converts it into a PNG variant that matches the active device model using ImageMagick. The device downloads and displays the rendered image.

Who is using LaraPaper

Here are some insights from the community survey about setups and motivations for using LaraPaper:

  • Hosting across NAS systems, home servers, Raspberry Pi setups, and VPS.
  • Strong preference for Docker Compose
  • Common content themes like weather, calendars, train/public transport data, and Home Assistant dashboards.
  • Frequent usage centered on local data access, privacy, and ownership.

Some users run a single DIY screen in a hallway, while others are preparing multi-device setups with different playlists for morning, evening, and shared spaces.

Thanks

Thank you to everyone supporting LaraPaper through feedback, bug reports, contributions and ideas.

Special thanks to supporters via the Creators Fund, the referral program, GitHub Sponsors, and Buy Me a Coffee.

Outlook

For the next phase, the focus is on:

  • Improve recipe compatibility
  • Upgrading to the freshly released Laravel 13 framework
  • General stability improvements until a 1.0 release

If LaraPaper helps your setup, you can support the project here:

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