Today I set up my old laptop as a Debian server, hosting Immich (for photos), Nextcloud (for files), and Radicale (for calendar). It was surprisingly easy to do so after looking at the documentation and watching a couple videos online! Tomorrow I might try hosting something like Linkwarden or Karakeep.
What else should I self-host, aside from HA (I don’t have a smart home), Calibre (physical books are my jam), and Jellyfin (I don’t watch too many movies + don’t have a significant DVD/Blu-ray collection)?
I would like to keep my laptop confined to my local network since I don’t trust it to be secure enough against the internet.
edit: I forgot, I’m also hosting Tailscale so I can access my local network remotely!
- Paperless if you want to keep your digital documents organized.
- Jellyfin/Navidrome for music streaming if you have a collection.
- AudiobookShelf for streaming & tracking progress of audoobooks if you have a collection.
- Kitchenowl for organizing your household (expenses, shopping lists, recipes, planning meals)
- FreshRSS for RSS-Feeds (News, Blogs etc)
Why Radicale when you have a caldav-capable calendar in NC?
I hosted Radicale first, so already had my calendar events and such set.
searchxng, libretranslate
What about AdGuard home, set your router to use your server as a DNS and get local network dns with adblocking?
Run a RocketChat server for me so I don’t have to pay $8/mo anymore
But a Pi and recover the cost in under a year.
I would but I prefer a server hosted outside of my country.
That’s fair, though if you’re concerned to that degree I’d say a rando hosting it would be a silly move. That said, I realize that was a joke. ;P
Straying away from utilities, games are always fun to host. I got started with self hosting by hosting a minecraft server, but there are plenty of options.
ooh I might try that then!
As you mentioned Immich, Nextcloud and Radicale - don’t forget to make regular backups. If you haven’t automated them, that’s your next project now ;)
that seems quite important, I’ll do that then!
Yes, back up your stuff regularly, don’t be like me and break your partition table with a 4 month gap between backups. Accomplishing 4 months of work in 5 hours is not fun.
Host a pangolin reverse proxy on a free oracle cloud VPS! It’s super nice to redirect online traffic to a LAN resource, that way you can share your home lab with friends and family without having to forward any ports or loosen your security posture.
https://blog.thetechcorner.sk/posts/Connect-to-your-homelab-over-CGNAT-with-tunnels-homelab-2-0/
I also highly recommend this suite of tools for downloading and streaming legal media via torrent because I would never endorse piracy.
You may or may not be a developer, but I would like to vote for Gitea/Forgejo. Should you ever get a grasp of git, a git forge is great for keeping code and even plain text documents recorded. It’s my favorite self-hosted service by far.
It can even operate as an OIDC server, so you can create a single login for all your services (that support OIDC).
I’ll also recommend Grist, an alternative to Google Sheets (and Notion, I believe?). It’s a web interface to spreadsheets that supports Python code as formulas. (I’ve also tried Nocodb, another Notion alternative, and I much prefer Grist.)
I am, indeed, a developer. I might try locally hosting Gitea/Forgejo as an extra backup. I assume you can have multiple “origins” in git, right? That means I can back my repository to both codeberg and server.
Grist seems pretty cool too.
Absolutely! I have used multiple origins for posting my projects to Gitea/Forgejo and GitHub. You can also mirror repositories from one site to another, too, although it requires a clean slate for pulling from another remote.
The biggest use case for me is documenting (as code) my home network setup on my private forge.
I love Grist!
My wife and I were frequent Google Sheet users and since a few years ago we started using Grist a lot. We tried some other alternatives before, but none of them felt even close to right for us.
can I ask what is the advantage of radicale over nextcloud calendar sync?
I’m thinking about moving my Nextcloud calendars and addressbooks to Baikal. Why? Because I like one “tool for one thing” better than “one tool for everything”.
that makes sense, not having all your eggs in one basket.
I hosted radicale first so already had my events sorted out. Wasn’t really bothered moving them again. Also, I like radicale, it’s simple and it works.
Ipfs gateway, Tor gateway
Just from the top of my head:
- Navidrome (Music)
- Audiobookshelf (Audiobooks)
- Paperless-ngx (documents)
- Joplin (notes, lists and more)
- Komga (comics)
- Mealie (mealplanner, recipes, shopping lists)
Edit: I left out some stuff that you or others already mentioned. But here’s the extended list so I can copy/paste this if someone else asks in the future.
- Immich (photos)
- Home Assistant (home automation)
- Jellyfin (Movies, TV series and more)
- Calibre & Calibre-Web (ebooks)
- Pi-hole (DNS sinkhole)
- Vaultwarden (password manager)
- Nextcloud (data sharing)
- Homarr (Dashboard)
- Headscale (Tailscale Server)
Honorable mention:
- Proxmox (Hypervisor)
- Portainer (Container Management) - I know a lot of people wouldn’t recommend it for various reasons, but works alright for me
That’s a big list. I already use joplin, but never knew you could self-host syncing! I’ll do that then :D
Why not Jellyfin for music? I’m curious as I run plex and Plexamp myself but have been considering switching over to Jellyfin for media.
I use Jellyfin for movies and TV shows, but never tried for music because I already had Navidrome set up. It is so good, really one of my all-time favourite pieces of software. It greatly repays a well-tagged collection, relying on embedded metadata only. Not sure how Jellyfin works here, maybe there is some ability to scrape album info from online sources (?), but I believe it’s pretty strict about directory structure (one folder per album), which Navidrome doesn’t care about.
I’ve set up navidrome a long time ago, way before I’ve started using Jellyfin. And it just runs like a charm paired with some great clients for the subsonic ecosystem. So honestly it never even occurred to me to use Jellyfin for music.
I’ve been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.
First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you’ve not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don’t want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.
I also recommend Pihole - it’s an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It’s really improved my experience on all my devices.
Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.
Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.
Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.
Ooh, I didn’t know you could self-host joplin sync! I’ve been using backblaze for quite a long time for that.
I selfhost Anysync for Anytype. In this way I can sync my notes with my family.
What else should I self-host, aside from HA (I don’t have a smart home), Calibre (physical books are my jam), and Jellyfin (I don’t watch too many movies + don’t have a significant DVD/Blu-ray collection)?
You sound kind of like me, but physical books are not my jam. I host a lot of things I use all the time. The most used app I selfhost is SearxNG. When you get it all set up, in your browser settings you can substitute DDG for your private SearxNG instance.
I host Obsidian which is a note taking app. It houses all my compose files, step by step tuts I’ve written to myself, interesting code snippets, etc. There are several encryption plugins for Obsidian that allow you to encrypt the document itself to keep it away from nosy people.
I host Readeck and Karakeep. These are bookmark type apps. I use Readeck for ‘read it later’ type articles I find are interesting. Karakeep I use for data preservation. Both can be used for both bookmarks and data preservation, I just keep 'em separated.
I host a lot more but that might get the juices flowing as it were.
Actual Budget is an open-source envelope-style budgeting tool similar to YNAB. It has a self-hostable syncing service so that you can manage your budget across multiple devices.
The reason you might want to do this is that it’s probably easier to do full account review sitting at your computer, but you might want to track expenses/receipts on your smartphone while you’re away from home.
I just cannot get this working without HTTPS even though it says in the documentation it’s not required. I think I’m going with Firefly-iii
I’ve had the same problem with getting Actual set up.
Actual has been great for my partner and me. Highly recommend!
