Bitwarden is an awesome password manager that lets you store all your login credentials, credit/debit cards, secure notes and other sensitive information in one place, encrypted. It’s super convenient, because you can access it from any device with an app or the web-based interface. Plus, it has all these cool features like password generation and two-factor authentication.

I’ve been jumping password managers for a while now, from the Firefox built in password manager (don’t do that, please…), to Nextcloud Passwords app, which works well, but I have some things that I don’t like, to Bitwarden.

I’ve been using it for a while now and it’s so much better than anything I’ve seen and tried. The apps are much faster, they don’t need to download all the passwords everytime, which takes a long time, at least for Nextcloud Passwords, and it’s polished and nice to use.

Also, it’s open-source and can be self-hosted! Those two are a dealbreaker to me, so I’m glad that I found something that works this well!

Vaultwarden⌗

(aka Bitwarden for Raspberry Pi)

This is an oversimplification of course. The main difference between Bitwarden and Vaultwarden is that Vaultwarden is written in Rust. But I care only about the Arm64 support.

I could run an x86 machine to host everything but that consumes way more power than a Raspberry Pi and since electricity is still getting more expensive, thanks Russia for making our lives harder, I want to consume as little power as possible.

As Vaultwarden is a rewritten Bitwarden, it won’t have all the features that Bitwarden has. It’s not that it doesn’t work, it does work (really well), but some new features will take longer to get implemented. It’s nothing deal breaking for me but it’s something to consider if you want to selfhost your own Bitwarden server.

Setting up the server⌗

(Now that was not as good as I wanted it to be)

So what’s the problem? Well it’s the documentation on selfhosting. Not that it’s missing, or it’s badly written. It’s mostly the part of finding it.

There’s no mention about self-hosting on their website. Open source is mentioned two times and at places where you won’t be looking for it. I almost thought that it’s closed source. And self hosting is not mentioned at all. I was going through their website for about 10 minutes until I ran out of patience and just looked at DockerHub where there was a Docker image available. Then I searched for the docs and finally found them with some help of DuckDuckGo.

The setup process⌗

The setup proces works quite well in my opinion. You create a user for Bitwarden, so that only Bitwarden can see the data so no other programms are able to read it, create a folder for your data and run a script which is supposed to setup everything for you.

But that didn’t work for me…⌗

docker-composed errored out because there were no images for arm64. So I looked at the images on DockerHub and there were no arm64 images at all…

So after a minute of searching I found a PiMyLifeUp tutorial. The tutorial wasn’t the best, it used Portainer, which I don’t have installed and don’t want to, it opened a port which isn’t needed (maybe it was in the past) as well as some other confusing things I had to deal with.

But thanks to the tutorial I now had a link to Vaultwarden. Now I was able to use the tutorial that had simpler instructions, and the Vaultwarden wiki which allowed me to modify/leave out obsolete steps.

Bitwarden’s mobile app⌗

Like I said already, it’s pretty good!

The nice interface is a welcome break from the NC Passwords app. It’s way faster, it’s instantenous to be correct. It caches the data, so even if the server’s down, you should be able to access your passwords.

It has auto-fill, pin codes, biometric unlock (fingerprint) and many more nice functions. It shows the auto-fill credentials directly on my keyboard (Gboard), it can save passwords from a web browser (Firefox) and it has many more things that I’m yet to try.

The only thing that annoyed me was that it didn’t show you the option to use your own Bitwarden instance. It’s hidden under settings on the login page but I was quick to figure that one out.

Conclusion⌗

Overall, I’m really impressed with Bitwarden and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a secure and convenient password manager. It’s fast, reliable (so far), has a nice UI and has the option to be either self-hosted or you can have an account on their official instance for free/small monthly payment.

Give it a try!