I’m already hosting pihole, but i know there’s so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!
Edit: Thanks all! I’ve got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!
Honestly Plex/Emby/Jellyfin whichever you prefer is a gamechanger because if you have a large library of content then it just cuts the cord from the subscription services.
I’ve always been happy to pay for them until I went on holiday last January and realised that none of my services were working due to going to a country that was out of the way and the only way to access them was to use a VPN.
So having my own Netflix is a great thing.
Tailscale while doing the above is also really cool
Yep. 100% agree. I have a 175TB server. Sure it was expensive to set up initially, but I have all shows and movies I want, always. From all the different services I would have to subscribe to, I imagine I have recovered my initial outlay and I never have to worry about media being removed from the service or it going out of business.
I have things that aren’t even available if I wanted to subscribe. Best thing you can do for yourself.
No commercials, always high quality. Available anywhere, at any time.
I really hope you have that backed up
He/she probably has all his/her movies backed up in the internet ;)
Home Assistant. It’s a rabbit hole, but it’s great. I’ve got motion enabled lights, thermostats for “dumb” heaters, and I track device usage (tablet, xbox) of my kids.
And it’s so nice having zero dependence on the cloud. If the internet drops out, everything still works, including the mobile app.
Not necessarily, I have devices that are cloud dependent. Locally in NZ there aren’t a lot of options, all smart plugs are cloud dependent. Also things like weather integrations will stop working.
It’s up to you to make it cloudless, but Home Assistant is the only solution I know of out there that even allows this possibility. I refuse to use anything in my home that requires a third party app or cloud connection (aside from initial pairing so I can flash it with ESPHome or some other local-only firmware). Admittedly it complicates things, but the payoff is so worth it.
I use Home Assistant as well, but Apple HomeKit (and the new Matter protocol) can also be cloudless I think.
Yup, HomeKit can 100% work without internet. It’s a requirement of being HomeKit certified. I block internet access to all my HomeKit devices and they work just fine.
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Self hosting nothing changed my life.
So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅
As others have worded it, it’s a hobby. Self hosting is only necessary for a very small number of people, less than one percent of people on here, but it’s a fun hobby, and I’ve learned a lot about software and networks from messing with self hosting stuff.
Vaultwarden is pretty game changing. No more reusing passwords and they aren’t in the cloud.
This is a rare one for which i wouldnt bother self hosting; i trust the centralized server provider, i can take an offline backup of my passwords and it only costs $10. And im the sort to run my own email server because i don’t trust the cloud providers.
I second your opinion about not selfhosting Bitwarden. About email, have a look at Proton mail. All the emails are encrypted in the server and are decripted client side with your password only when you open them.
Stay away from Plex, if you like to go with Free and Open source.
I’ll start with Jellyfin, and Arr family (sonarr,radarr,prowlarr or Jackett), Vaultwarden and immich
Edit: Learn to spin up docker instances first, as above services would be easier to manage in docker containers and for back ups I prefer Duplicati. And if you run it 24x7 add AdguardHome or PiHole to the mix
Edit1: if you are extremely new to docker instances and find it hard to learn, just spin up CasaOS and you’ll be good to go as it makes spinning up docker containers so easy.
You can self host a local chatgpt like ai known as a local large language model. Searx and Searxbg are great customizable meta search engines that you can customize to scrape whatever you want
Portainer - For docker containers.
AdGuard Home on 2 separate Raspberry Pi Pico W.
HomeAssistant on its own hardware. Home automation
SearXNG - private search.
Whoogle - private search.
Shaarli - Bookmarks.
youtube-dl - downloading videos.
PaperlessNGX - document storage.
Trilium Notes - notes app
These are the ones I can’t live without. All docker containers running on a NAS.
Why do you need to host youtube-dl?
I guess it’s not so much “hosting” as having it on your home NAS with some scripts to backups channels and videos that you like. At least that’s what I do.
Thought I should make a point to mention youtube-dl is dead, yt-dlp is the replacement and it works great. Even has a command line flag to make its options work the same as the options in youtube-dl so it can be a drop in replacement for existing scripts.
If you spend some time learning how docker/podman works you’ll be able to host practically anything!
Docker I can’t wrap my head around. I keep trying to spend a night and sit down and play around with it. But I hit a block, get distracted and never get anywhere.
Use chatgpt to help you keep going, it’s very helpful
edit: Thought I’d expand on this more. Treat ChatGPT like a fellow engineer who never gets annoyed at answering your questions, and will never tell you that you’re dumb (haha). Tell it what yo’ure trying to do, copy paste your commands into it, copy paste the error messages if you have any. Literally, inundate it with questions and info and it’ll help you understand what you’re doing and help you unblock yourself. It’s a great tool.
@jaackf
SyncThing. It’s the best sort of selfhosted program. You set it up once and then never think about it because it just keeps quietly doing what you wanted.Wikis can be great if you’ve got a few folks that need to coordinate information.
An RSS reader/aggregator.
TandoorRecipes is a great little recipe-hosting service, and it’s available as an app on Unraid. No more saving recipes in my notes app, I actually have nicely-formatted ingredient lists and instructions.
Nextcloud to replace Google drive/docs. Jellyfin or plex for media. The arrs to aquire media (if you have the patience). A blog? A game server to play with friends.
I suggest using docker and docker-compose as it makes everything way easier. It does still take time and it can be frustrating but it is very rewarding.
Crosspost from the duplicate
Docker is definitely worth the time investment.
If OP wants to go one level deeper: Ansible.
Does ansible make sense for a single server? I like the concept but I don’t know if It makes sense for my purpose.
It makes sense in terms of reproducibility.
Imagine if your server gets compromised, you accidentally break it, or you just want to move to a cheaper provider or a different server. Do you want to have to tweak it all over again, and fix bugs that you figured out how to fix 6 months ago and you don’t remember?
I’d rather have some yaml files that do it for me. And it’s a new skill as well.
Running a Tor exit node could certainly be life changing. Not sure in a good way, guess it depends which country you live in.
I did that for a while to try and learn about filtering malicious traffic from the network. Doing that long term would definetly change my life, but very much not in a good way. It’s a endless whack-a-mole game and the winning prize is that your ISP doesn’t give you a call weekly.
It took couple of weeks until the ISP first called and told me that I have malicious traffic coming from my IP. I explained the situation and their representative was very understanding and handled the thing as well as he ever could. I tried to adjust filters, blocklists and all the jazz which was pretty much a full time job already and I still couldn’t make it work on a sufficient level. I got another couple of calls from ISP (again, handled spectaculary considering I was pushing several hundreds Mbps dirty traffic out in the wild) and eventually they just plainly said that they’re forced to kill my connection if situation doesn’t improve. I ran a node without exit for a while but as that’s not a interesting thing to run I eventually shut it down to free resources for more interesting things.
If you have the time and knowledege to do that, I really encourage that, but for me it was too much to keep in the network while trying to maintain some sanity on my everyday life. I firmly believe that my goal of filtering malicious traffic out and keeping an exit node runnig is achievable goal, I just don’t have enough knowledge nor time to gain enough of it to keep exit node running.
And of course there’s legal issues as well and severity of them heavily depends on where you’re living, so really do your homework before doing anything like that.
An RSS reader (I use Miniflux), ended up being extremely useful
- Almost every piece of software worth selfhosting has an RSS feed for updates (e.g., every GitHub releases page has an RSS feed). I started selfhosting a good deal more after setting up Miniflux.
- Like omg there is this whole internet out there outside of Reddit/Twitter/etc that does RSS. The vast majority of blogs have RSS (e.g., Wordpress and Substack). I wish I had discovered RSS decades ago, so many websites I’ve forgotten because I would check updates manually and eventually just forget. I even host a personal Nitter instance so I can follow Twitter people in Miniflux.
PiHole!
One of the easiest installer I’ve ever seen. Significantly less ads to be shown especially one on non-browser.
Exactly a couple of things that we (me and the wife) use really often:
- AdGuard Home is IMHO so much easier to use, although it has been a while since I’ve used Pi-Hole.
- CouchDB for the Obsidian LiveSync plugin
- Immich for a self hosted Google Photos alternative
- Nginx Proxy Manager for exposing all of my services
- Vaultwarden is invaluable for us
Thanks for teaching me about LiveSync, not being able to sync my notes with mobile without an obsidian account has been annoying, but none of the web based interfaces look at nice or as usable as obsidian. Being able to sync everything between desktops and mobile will be really handy.
While Vaultwarden is great I would not suggest selfhosting your password manager unless you do regular backups. Losing all your password cause your server went down is a great way to ruin your day.
I don’t think that’s true. Even when Bitwarden server is down you can still access your Bitwarden vault, use and export all passwords. You can’t save new passwords but using existing ones should work perfectly fine. So, when your server is down/broken, export your vault, fix server and get new Vaulwarden instance up and import your vault again. Thats it. I still find it safer to selfhost it than getting my passwords leaked.
Nevertheless, are backups crucial. But it is relatively easy with vaultwarden-backup and the free object storage of AWS, Oracle and so on.
