Share your car (or van, truck, motorcycle, etc.) with other people and keep track of the costs.

The app implements a cost-sharing model based on real-world experience running a shared van for several years.

Every user pays per distance driven. Expenses such as fuel, regular servicing, taxes, and insurance are subtracted from each user's outstanding balance. When a shared expense arises, like f.e. a repair job, users ideally organize the payment so that balances are kept even. If that is not always possible, direct money transfers between users can be recorded to bring everyone back to the same level.

The app can assist you with finding the right rate per kilometer/mile after you've used it for a while, creating enough trips and expenses for the app to work with.

• 📅 Calendar — book the vehicle and see when other users have upcoming reservations
• 🚗 Expenses & trips — track fuel costs, service bills, and cash transfers between users
• 👥 User groups — assign users to groups with different per-kilometre/per-mile rates (e.g. "Crew" for regular members and "Guests" for occasional drivers)
• 📊 Statistics — view overall usage and cost statistics for the vehicle
• 📍 Parking location — share the current parking spot with other users, including a map view
• 💬 Message board — post updates and notes about the vehicle for all members to see
• 🔄 Calendar sync — sync bookings with any CalDAV-compatible calendar app (DAVx⁵, Apple Calendar, Thunderbird …) — see docs/caldav.md
• 🧩 REST API — control the application programmatically, e.g. from a smartphone app
• 🌍 Available languages - english, german, french, spanish, dutch and polish

The software is running at car-coop.net. You can try it out or use it there by creating a free account. Please note that the app is currently in beta — bug reports are very welcome.

Currently there is an Android and iOS app in development (using flutter). Release of the Android App on Google Play Store and fdroid is planned until may. Check out the github project. Developing open source for iOS and the apple store however is a pain and involves yearly fees which i am currently not willing to pay.

The easiest way to run Car Coop in production is with Docker. PHP, Apache, and MariaDB all run in containers, and database migrations are applied automatically on startup.

• Docker 24+
• Docker Compose v2

git clone <repository-url> car-coop
cd car-coop

cp .env.example .env

Open .env and set at minimum:

Optional variables:

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml up -d --build

This will:

1. Build the application image (installs PHP dependencies, compiles frontend assets)
2. Start MariaDB and wait until it is healthy
3. Run all pending database migrations
4. Start Apache on the configured port
5. Start the Symfony Messenger worker for background job processing

Navigate to http://<your-server> (or http://localhost if running locally). Register the first user — they can then be promoted to admin from the user management screen.

git pull
docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml up -d --build

Migrations run automatically on every startup, so the database schema is always kept in sync with the new code.

Back up uploaded files:

docker run --rm \
  -v car-coop_uploads:/data \
  -v $(pwd):/backup \
  alpine tar czf /backup/uploads-backup.tar.gz -C /data .

Back up the database:

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml exec db \
  sh -c 'mysqldump -u"$MYSQL_USER" -p"$MYSQL_PASSWORD" "$MYSQL_DATABASE"' \
  > backup.sql

# Stop without removing data
docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml down

# Stop and remove all data (irreversible)
docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml down -v

To run the app on a VM with a web server of your choice (PHP 8.3+ required), clone the repository and run:

APP_ENV=prod composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
APP_ENV=prod APP_DEBUG=0 php bin/console cache:clear
php bin/console lexik:jwt:generate-keypair --skip-if-exists
php bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate
php bin/console asset-map:compile

These commands must also be run after pulling updated code.

The Symfony Messenger component handles background jobs asynchronously and requires a persistent worker process. Use Supervisor to manage it — an example configuration is provided in deploy/supervisor/.

After installing Supervisor, copy the config file to /etc/supervisor/conf.d/ and update the path to point to your project root, then run:

supervisorctl reread
supervisorctl update
supervisorctl start car-coop-messenger

After a code update, restart the worker so it picks up the new code:

supervisorctl restart car-coop-messenger

Start the Docker containers from the project root:

docker compose up -d

Open a shell inside the application container for Symfony console commands:

docker exec -it car-coop-www-1 bash

Then run the initial setup:

composer install
php bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate
php bin/console lexik:jwt:generate-keypair --skip-if-exists

The development site is available at http://localhost:8080/en/register.

The .env file is committed to the repository and contains only placeholder values for secrets. Override any value locally by creating a .env.local file in the project root — it is ignored by Git and takes precedence over .env.

At minimum you should set:

# .env.local
JWT_PASSPHRASE=<your-jwt-passphrase>   # must match the passphrase used when generating the JWT key pair
APP_SECRET=<random-32-char-string>     # generate with: openssl rand -hex 16

Any other variable from .env can be overridden the same way (e.g. DATABASE_URL, MAILER_DSN, SENTRY_DSN).