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!
I’m looking to get started with self hosting too. Could you share the links you used to get yourself set up?
Radicale’s official documentation didn’t help me much, so I followed some youtube video (by “Awesome Open Source”) where you use a docker image instead of a python venv + pip install.
For Immich, official docs were fantastic!
For Nextcloud, I followed Learn Linux TV’s “How to Set Up Nextcloud on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS” (though I used Debian, not Ubuntu)
Awesome SelfHosted is a great place to start looking: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.
There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.
There a million ways, and you will probably find tons of tutorials each different - Docker, Docker Compose, native install, VMWare, Kubernetes, Portainer, etc. I recommend starting with a clean machine - preferably with an attached monitor - and installing your favorite Linux distro (Ubuntu is among the easiest), getting Docker and Docker Compose running, and familiarizing yourself with these technologies.
Then you can start with a simple app like Paperless (document digitization), Vikunja (TODOs), BookStack (wiki), or PrivateBin (pastebin), getting it running and persist state over a period of time, then setting up a reverse proxy so you don’t have to use IPs all the time (with just editing your hosts file to point a URL to IP of your machine), and then it is a free world.
Of course, having the whole setup secure, independent, and easily manageable is partially eyperience and partially understanding your needs.
You will probably even find whole ready-to-deploy git repositories that are easily configurable, so you can go with that too.