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3. How to use it ?

After you have created your Vaultwarden instance it is time to use it and start creating accounts. In this small tutorial we will describe the process of how a friend or family member can create an account and how it can be used with the Bitwarden extensions and applications. 

  1. If you want to invite a friend or family member to join your server then you can do so in two ways.  
  2.  The first one is to let them go to your instance website e.g vw.example.org and let them sign up for an account. Now, this is an easy method but this also means that you need to have sign up on. This is of course a security risk even though it is not that big if only your friends know about it
  3. The second method is to go into your admin page and create invitation links for your friends that only they can openn. Simply go to your admin page -> users -> then at the bottom there is an option to send an invitation link.

Hence, if you don't want to run a public instance it is best to leave sign ups off and only send invitation links to your friends and family. 

After they have created an account they can start using these credentials for logging in to all Bitwarden applications on all devices. The only thing they need to make sure of is that they select your self hosted server when they want to log in.

Some Tips for new entries

First of all it is recommended to create seperate folders for different types of credentials. You can of course choose whatever you want but a basic structure could be as follows

  1. Shapps: A folder for all your self hosted apps either hosted by your or by one of friends/family members
  2. Home lab: If you have a homelab then you can store all your network equipment, proxmox, nas and other infrastructure credentials in here
  3. Personal: For all your personal accounts i.e Identity, Passports, Licenses, etcetera
  4. Bank Accounts: Well pretty self explanatory
  5. Backupfriends: Credentials you keep track of for family members or friends, but also credentials you use to login to a backup server of one of your friends
  6. Accounts: This is a general account folder for all accounts on third party apps that are not self hosted or hosted by one of your friends.