What else should I self-host?
What else should I self-host?
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!
- 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/
- 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
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.
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
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.)
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.
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 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.
What about AdGuard home, set your router to use your server as a DNS and get local network dns with adblocking?
Maybe Pihole/Adguard home?
Paperless-ngx - it allows you to upload important documents like receipts, contracts, etc. and uses OCR so you can search them
Snikket is easy to host in a docker container. You would have your own internet messenger for friends and family. Snikket is based on the xmpp protocol thats been around for 20 years, is tried and tested and very lightweight and does take very few resources on your server. things like Nintendo's messenger and WhatsApp are xmpp based).
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.
Home Assistant? Maybe a homepage like Heimdall or some other dashboard? Maybe Uptime Kuma to notify you when your services go down? Definately a pihole or adguard home. Biggest quality of life improvement. It's the biggest thing my wife notices and approves of. She audibly groans in disgust when she leaves the LAN on her cellphone and sees all the ads and garbage that had previously been blocked. My pihole dashboard show 70% of the requests are blocked on my LAN. And everything works great.
Syncthing for files syncing, to replace stuff like OneDrive, Dropbox etc.
I use to sync files between my NAS, laptop, Steam Deck and phone, each with different dirs based on what I need synced there.
Ipfs gateway, Tor gateway
If you're just looking for something to chew up CPU cycles and don't know what to host, consider something like BOINC where you're "self-hosting" (extremely loose term) scientific research, like cancer, new drugs, etc.
Karakeep is fantastic, I know you mentioned it already, but I just wanted to shout it out. The AI tagging is a little gimmicky and pointless, but it's super nice to have a really searchable, automatically organized bookmark manager.
I look at what services I use and see if I can replace any of them w/ a self-hosted solution. Rinse and repeat.
Looking for more stuff to host will just overcomplicate things. I instead try to look for ways to consolidate services down.
If you have a car Lubelogger is a solid maintenance tracker.