Self hosted FOSS software
Self hosted FOSS software
I just recently started playing around with an old pc as my homeserver and am curious of any recommendations for lesser known self hostable foss software that you would recommend
147 comments
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The piece of string is very long!
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
You may need to work backwards, identify a service as a need and then figure out which software to run.
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This is an awesome resource! I already have what i need (file, torrent, gitea server), but im looking for software to try out just for fun.
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Yeah, I get ya but when you scroll that list you can see why it's a hard topic to reply to. There is a lot of fun to be had!
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Here are some I find really useful:
- Jellyfin (media interface)
- paperless-ng (document store with OCR, tagging, search, etc.)
- Miniflux (RSS reader)
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- dokuwiki
- draw.io
- gitea
- woodpecker (ci/cd)
- minio
- postgres
- freshrss (rss server and reader)
- firefly3 (finance / budgets / expenses)
- calibre
- Pi-hole (primary on a pi, secondary on docker host)
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Have you looked at Adguard Home instead of pi-hole? I had been on pi-hole for years and just recently switched to AGH. My primary is in docker and secondary on pi but I think I like your idea better so I'll probably switch that around. I like AGH better so far.
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!selfhost@lemmy.ml
https://lemmy.ml/c/selfhost(still don't know how to link communitys here)
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For a real hands off approach take a look at Yunohost or CapRover. Both are very easy installs and will give you a gui to manage your applications and other self-hosted services. It's a great way to dip your toes in. The only difference is that with yunohost, they bundle most of the self-hosted services with their own local-sso implementation, so you only need one login for all your services. This is nice if you want a set it and forget it solution. With CapRover, you basically just have a nice gui to manipulate docker installs, so if you find it a bit too restricting, you could just manipulate the docker installs yourself via command line.
Both are great entry points!
EDIT: Honorable mention of DietPi !
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Here are a few I like:
- Jellyfin - a media server software that allows you to organize and stream your personal media collection.
- NextCloud - a self-hosted file sync and sharing platform. Not as good as Google Drive (of course), but it can do the job.
- Bitwarden (with a Rust-written alternative named vaultwarden) - a password manager for storing and autofilling login credentials.
- Matrix - an open network for secure, decentralized communication. WhatsApp, but in the Fediverse.
- PiHole - a DNS sinkhole that blocks ads and other unwanted content.
- Mycroft - an open-source voice assistant. You can make your own Google Home with it.
- OctoPrint - web interface that allows you to control 3D printers. Pretty handy if you have one!
- Gitea - a lightweight self-hostable GitHub
- Home Assistant - an open-source home automation platform. Can integrate a lot of other things in your house.
- The X-arr initiative - a collection of tools for managing and organizing media libraries. Pretty good if you deploy your own media server:
- Sonarr - Select TV shows and it will automatically download episodes for you.
- Radarr -> movies
- Lidarr -> music
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From the things I use:
- Uptime Kuna, for monitoring the availability of websites/services
- Gitea, for hosting code
- PicoShare, for sharing files
- Maddy, for email
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How has your experience hosting your own email been? I often hear that the big providers (Google, Microsoft, etc.) will simply drop your sent mails.
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I also host my own mail and there's been little issues.
Microsoft is a pain in the ass if you're in an IP space they don't like like DigitalOcean. Which is ironic because they have the worst spam filter by far in the industry.
If you want to get through to everyone you will have to:
- Use a "good" TLD ( not .to, not .xyz, ...)
- Don't use cloud platforms that are regularily used for spam (mostly DigitalOcean)
- Use SPF
- Use DMARC
- Use DKIM
- Use a PTR record
- Don't make an open relay by accident
- Use proper ports and certificates
- Register an abuse account at the big players (Google, Microsoft, ...)
- Don't use an dynamic IP
- Keep it up to date
- Minimize downtime
I can't recommend mailcow enough, it makes setting up a mail server a breeze.
https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized
Use the MXToolbox to verify your server(s).
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It’s a fun project that’s worth trying yourself once or twice. For me it was a huge learning experience but ultimately too much work to maintain so I ultimately went to a paid email service.
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I have had issues with it over the years. Many will blacklist entire cidr nets for a single bad actor. I get this on my linodes frequently if I proxy traffic through them. Ie: tons of captchas on google/YouTube.
When I ran my own mail it was similar. Often having to spend time getting IPs off rbls and the like because some other node on my subnet was malicious.
In the end, I just moved my email over to workspace. Not ideal. But it works.
One thing I did notice was that as soon as I registered my domain in workspace (but hadn’t even setup mx records or began moving mail) a lot of issues with google immediately stopped, and thus, same with Office.com. I actually ran this way for a while but then google axed freed accounts and I just moved my stuff to them and pay.
Maybe because I use a gTLD? I dunno. But it was a headache.
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Ok I may have to set up uptime Kuma. I have some services that I don't realize are down until I need them, and it gets frustrating
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One of my most used softwares on my server is calibre and calibre-web. It allows me to self host my own book server with a very nice looking front end
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Thanks, i think this will be my next project. By the way it migt interest you that you can self host the entire gutenberg project using kiwix
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Ohh that is very interesting. I really like hosting media like that. I feel it’s very important to share knowledge with people in what ways you can, especially literature
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I was unaware of that, and I really shouldn't have been. Thanks.
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How is the workflow with this? Also what kind of frontend client can be used for reading? I'm curious to try but haven't got the time to set this up so far.
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So I use calibre as my backend client essentially. My library is managed through there, and I load my books in there as I get new books. It’s a bit clunky, but it’s reliable for what it does, and can even be set to auto tag your books and grab new covers for them
Calibre-web is what I mainly use to interact with it in my day to day uses. It’s a very clean front end that connects to my calibre server, and even has account management if that’s your thing. It’s hosted as a website, so I can access it from anywhere in the world. When I click on a book, I can either read it in the browser, or I can download it. Usually I just download them to my tablet and read them there as you would any other pdf/ebook. It’s a super clean way to manage a ton of books
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I really like Memos. It's a micro blogging site that is minimal, but has a lot of neat features. I'm using it as a replacement for DayOne's journal app.
And I'll second Veloren. My kids and I are having a blast playing.
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Jellyfin is a great FOSS alternative to Plex for TV/Movie playback.
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- Portainer server and agent for monitoring all docker hosts in one place
- Traefik as reverse proxy
- Dashy (complex) and Homarr (simpler) as dashboards
- Gluetun for VPN access for containers and proxy for everyone on the network
- Radarr/Sonarr for managing Movies and TV shows
- Navidrome for music
- Audiobookshelf for audiobooks
- Transmission/qbittorrent/rtorrent/deluge as torrent clients
- Pinhole for DNS
- Technitium for more advanced DNS and DHCP (might replace all piholes with this or blocky in the future)
- Plex/Jellyfin for media streaming
- JellyfinVue - awesome frontend to jellyfin
- Bazarr - for subtitles
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Caddy is simpler for the reverse proxy. Just sharing for people that get scared when they try to set up Traefik.
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Ngnix-proxy-manager is even simpler :) But along with the automatic router creation using labels, I've found traefik to be the most robust of all three.
The traefik syntax and configuration using yaml is really initutive. I can link a good guide here if someone wants it. The official documentation isn't that good.
One of my favourite guides explaining the configuration files for traefik.
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Honestly I started using traefik first and I agree, the learning curve is steep. I'm only just now starting to understand what my labels are doing. But now, I've tried caddy and literally cannot get it to work, or find how to port what I have on traefik over to caddy lol.
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You may be way ahead of me on this, but I highly recommend using docker for this endeavor(or podman), as it really allows you to try a lot out without making a mess of your system.
I run pihole, syncthing, and gitea locally(among less interesting things.)
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I just started using podman yesterday, and only used docker for about a week before that, im excited for the learning to be had in this area. A couple days ago i tried pihole, for some reason it didnt serve the web interface, but i will definitely kepp on trying.
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So PiHole is a little special if I recall correctly, you have to give it a dedicated virtual interface. Or at least I did. I'd highly recommend using docker compose(or the podman equivalent) for setting up your various containers. It makes it very easy to bring them up and down and modify them quickly and easily.
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Yacht is a great UI for starting a container, especially for self hosting, there are a good amount of tutorial online.
I personally also host
- syncthings that will sync my app settings on the phone, and push it to my cloud drive,
- pi-hole to block trackers. I generally let ad through, but not trackers.
- jellyfin for media library
- transmission for (cough, cough) seeding fedora, mint and other free and open source, and 100% legal stuff.
- home assistant for automations.
Some other things you can try:
- a home Minecraft server, not exactly FOSS, but if you are into it, you should do it.
- Nextcloud for syncing photo and documents, but remember to keep a offsite backup.
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Can you share with me what OS you are running? At the moment I am using MX Linux because it is familiar to me, but is likely suboptimal for running a server.
I think docker is really cool, but felt like a lot of work compared to using flatpaks or a package manager, but I am really limiting myself and it is probably not that hard to learn.
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The thing about docker is, you can set it up with all your data mounted into a folder in your home directory. So, for instance, ~/docker/jellyfin/data, and your docker compose file for jellyfin is in the jellyfin folder. So if you want to move it to a different system, you just rsync the folder over and run docker-compose up and it's done. Also, backups are super simple, because you just stop the container, rsync (or Borg or duplicati, restic... whatever) your container's folder over. Of your server gets completely trashed, you just restore your backup to another computer and you're good. Usually the better maintained projects are even architecture aware, so you can move from Intel to arm or whatever. It's totally worth learning.
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Oh, as for os, i'd recommend dietpi on a SBC that uses a memory card, because it logs to RAM so you don't wear the card as much, and Debian for everything else. You don't run Into problems with Debian. Unless you like snaps, then go with Ubuntu. As much as I hate snaps, they are good for some services that tend to break on upgrades, like has been my experience with nextcloud.
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Strange, Lemmy didn't tell me you replied. Well, I run mostly Ubuntu Server OSs for Linux for work, but at home I am cheating and using a Synology NAS as my home server with docker installed on it. CentOS used to be a good go-to for servers, but I think Redhat made some changes to the way it releases and I think a lot of the CentOS users moved to other distros.
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These are the ones I use most actively, on my FreedomBox:
- bepasty for moving around or sharing temporary files
- Quassel for staying connected to IRC servers
- Radicale for synchronizing my calendar and tasks.
- Syncthing for files I want to have available between my laptop, desktop, phone.
- Tiny Tiny RSS for following blogs.
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Miniflux as an RSS reader
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I actually was looking around for rss readers, but havent found one that can save entire articles and serves them offline. Does this support that?
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This will create rss feeds with the full article. It can then be used in your aggregator/reader of choice to allow offline reading. I use it in combination with FreshRSS and Feeder on android.
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I suppose so, but I'm not sure since it's a web app
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Home Assistant! You can host it inside a VM.
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I attempted to use different home assistant softwares, but i always ended up deciding that i will wait till offline voice recognition is a bit more usable (not being a native englis speaker its a rougher experience). I will pobably try it again soon though.
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Home Assistant, despite the name, isn't an Assistant like Alexa or Google Home, it is actually a home automation integrator. It connects to practically everything, and then workflows can be triggered off the states of your IOT stuff. In my house, I use it to, among other things, turn down/off the light when grid power goes down and I'm running on battery power, as well as send me a notification that I've lost grid power.
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Personally, as well as NextCloud, I'd host instances of LibreX, CloudTube, PiHole, Gitea, XMPP, and CryptPad.
If it's fun you're after, though, why not try hosting a Minecraft server? And how about XMPP or Matrix, to keep in touch with friends?
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What's your xmpp server of choice?
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I haven't really looked into it much, as I don't currently have enough time or money to self-host anything, but I'd probably go with Prosody to start with.
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Nextcloud, Bitwarden (vaultwarden is the name of the OSS server), Adguard Home / Pihole and Paperless-NGX might be some things which can have a pretty big impact in your daily life.
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I have two instances of BookStack. A public-facing one for bird stuff, and one for home stuff. I also self-host an instance of Plausible Analytics as a privacy-respecting alternative to Google Analytics.
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pihole/adblock monero node/support monero network p2pool/mining pool for monero wireguard/vpn Tor relay, i have thought of using an old pc to support Tor
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I've got a pretty booring setup compared to most 🤣. Ubuntu Server running the following in docker,
- Plex
- Audiobookshelf
- Komga
Audiobookshelf has come a really long way. The version out now is heaps and bounds better than what it was 1 year ago.
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Also, if you want to actually learn, I would strongly recommend against using Docker containers for everything. Besides being stuck with what the developers prefer, all the work of installing things is already done.
I really disagree on this point. You should use docker or podman (preferably Podman) to containerize your applications on your server to keep them ephemeral and separated from the host OS wherever possible. This improves security, makes setups reproducible, and eases backup and restore procedure. If you want to build from source do so with a containerfile/docker file to keep your build environment fresh and clean.
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Exactly this. You should use docker and for a beginner Podman is perfect.
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Syncthing to replace Google drive and Photoprism for Photos. Both have a great functionality and run well on my 12yrs old home server with 2gb of ram.
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I'm really happy with Photoprism as well, it's great to have facial recognition without relying on Google Photos
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Yeah, and syncing is so easy, I just press a button and don't care about it.
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On my 2 raspberry pi's I am running Pihole, Pivpn, Syncthing, Photoprism, Unify controller, Heimdall (webpage that has all my servers....locally accessible, or non local via wireguard connection via pivpn) Might be more can't remember! Prob more from other suggestions on here over next few days 😂
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Might I suggest Dashy/Homarr? Heimdall has been abandoned I think. I went from Heimdall to Organizarr to Dashy/Homarr.
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This reminds me that I need to learn how to use SSH so I can put files on a server.
I have been doing everything the hardway, but I have a few capable older computers I want to put to work.
Self-hosting is going to be my new hobby, I know it.
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SSH, and then docker compose. Are you familiar with linux CLI? Also, if you're interested in putting files on a server, you can always mount the folders locally with sshfs. SSH is basically enough to make linux preferable to windows for anyone who likes to tinker or do anything remotely. And it's not going away either. The SSH knowledge I gained a decade ago is still completely relevant.
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I am! Well, sort of. I never really learned how to write scripts to automate anything, so I have severely limited myself. I do know a lot of common commands and how look stuff up in man pages. I am comfortable just not competent with linux CLI.
I guess I have my work cut out for me. I will probably reinstall the OS, something more lightweight. Since I am making a server I would like it to be headless. It is an older machine, HP Elitedesk G1, so it is small and gets loud when it does anything.
Thank you!
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I'm using the following:
Plex for music/anime/tv/movies, calibre webserver for ebooks/manga, qbittorrent web+Prowlarr to search for and download content, SyncThing to keep things in sync between my server and desktop, and I'm also file sharing with nicotine++
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Jellyfin with Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr and some torrent client makes a great automated media server. Just don't forget a VPN!
147 comments
Edit: Fixed PiHole from saying "VPN" blocker to "AD" :-D
Are we sure Libreddit will stop working? The latest post from Reddit states that less than 100 api calls per second will remain free if you're logged in. I'm not exactly sure how Libreddit works (I use a self-hosted Troddit instance) but it's my understanding that API calls tied to your own user should be fine as long as you stick under than 100/sec limit.
Just going off what they said:
https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit/issues/785