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!
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
As someone who works in security, I don’t personally recommend self hosting your password manager unless you’re planning on never opening it up outside your network or you’re willing to be on top of all potential security issues. These are your account credentials we’re talking about. You WANT them safe, and the people paid to make sure they stay secure are likely going to do a better job than you.
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’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.
Run a RocketChat server for me so I don’t have to pay $8/mo anymore
I run a small setup on a seperate server segment (2nd router behind my main router) so it is on the internet. I run nextcloud, an dendrite and conduit instance (matrix chat-server servers), a mastodon and go-to-social instance (fediverse), bitwarden (password manager), and others.
If there is a service that you do not want to be publically accessable by everybody but you do want to access from everywhere on the internet yourself, check out client-side TLS (https) certificates. The server does is accessable from the internet put only people who have a TLS certificate on their client signed by you can access it. For services that do not require incoming connections from other machines (e.g. nextcloud, bitwarden, … but no federated services like matrix-chat or the fediverse) that is a very good option to protect your servers.
- 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)
- LinkDing for Bookmark Management
- Game-Servers (like Minecraft or others)
EDIT:Added Linkding & GameServers
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.)
- AdguardHome/Pi-Hole (for DNS Filter)
- DrawIO (MS Visio equivalent)
- Invidious (Youtube privacy frontend)
- SearxNG (Google Privacy frontend)
- Vaultwarden (Self-hosted Bitwarden server)
- Miniflux (RSS Reader)
- linkWarden (Link aggregator)
Also, checkout https://selfh.st/apps/
How safe is it to self host something that you open up to the web? I’ve been thinking about a keepass self host, but I need it to be accessible from anywhere… I’m just really worried what that does once you open up your local server to the world
- SearxNG (Google Privacy frontend)
SearXNG is more than just a front end for google search, it’s an aggregator, if configured properly can collect results from Bing, Startpage, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, Brave.
I’m no expert, but I read that self hosting your own instance doesn’t actually help with privacy since the search providers still track those requests and if you’re the only one using it, that’s just tracking you with extra steps.
Of course if you use a public instance, you have to then trust that the instance isn’t tracking you
Firefly III in order to track your expenses
Actual Budget if you’re more into envelope budgeting. I came from YNAB and could not get the same workflow out of Firefly as I could YNAB. Actual Budget does provide that.
I do think setting up HTTPS is required for Actual so if you don’t have that yet, then Firefly is the way to go.
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
Correct. It refuses to run without https. That is by design.
That’s not a great decision for self hosted software
🤷 They probably think they have a good reason for it.
I want to add dockge, for making it easy to manage / update your docker containers.
https://github.com/louislam/dockge
Love it. Saves me lots of time.
If you don’t want a GUI, dockcheck is an easy way to update many containers at once from the CLI.