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.
Little subquestion how fast is your nextclous instance? Cause mine is pretty slow don’t really know why
Mozhi its searxng of translators
I’ve got LibreTranslate installed so don’t need another translator, but Mozhi seems pretty cool though :D
Firefly III in order to track your expenses
In my experience, firefly is not aimed at household or personal finance. It is very obviously made by and for accountants.
Actual Budget is much more approachable for the normal home user, and very similar to the successful YNAB.
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.
Hi, I’ve tried Actual Budget but I’ve found more interesting in terms of options Firefly, so I’ve chosen for it :)
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.
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.
- 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
If you want to expose a container based service just for yourself over internet, you can -
-
If you have static IP4 or IPV6 - Setup Wireguard VPN on your homelab/server, and wireguard client on client devices[1].
-
If you are behind NAT or CGNAT - either Cloudflared Tunnel[2] or Tailscale[3].
In either scenarios, you need to setup firewall of your server to allow connection from LAN to port of your docker container/services. By default you should set your firewall to block all incoming request from anywhere except LAN.
I’m personally using Cloudflared Tunnel, but planning to migrate to Tailscale.
[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-wireguard-on-ubuntu-20-04
[2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/
-
- 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.
Yacy is a web crawler/search engine that IIRC you can self host and use as a SearXNG backend
That’s correct. Thanks for the correction.
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
Unless you are routing traffic through a VPN.
I just recently started routing mine through a gluetun container, but now I’m hitting timeouts pretty consistently. Not sure if there’s a solution to that or just deal with it.
For which self-hosted app? Invidious?
While true, they still collect data on the results hosting your own instance can prevent you from hitting rate-limits as often.
- 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)
Are you using Kitchenowl for storing recipes? If so, what’s your experience with it?
I’ve tried Tandoor, the common suggestion for recipe management, but I’ve found it too clunky to add recipes to. I like the concept, but it would take a long time to move all my recipes into the specific format they use, and the web UI does not make things easier.
Worth checking out Mealie, too. Can’t say how it compares to Tandoor or Kitchenowl but I’ve been happy with Mealie for years now.
My experience with the function is limited, but I think it’s decent. Markdown support, import from websites etc. If you add the items to the recipe with their amounts and then write them out in the text it automatically give you the amount you need based on the portions specified.
On app.kitchenowl.org you can create a demo-user and household. Within that, you can try the recipe function. Sign up requires a mail-address, but it does not need to be a valid one.
Why Radicale when you have a caldav-capable calendar in NC?
I hosted Radicale first, so already had my calendar events and such set.
searchxng, libretranslate
It’s searxng but yes. That is a good suggestion.
What about AdGuard home, set your router to use your server as a DNS and get local network dns with adblocking?
Ipfs gateway, Tor gateway
Straying away from utilities, games are always fun to host. I got started with self hosting by hosting a minecraft server, but there are plenty of options.
Run a RocketChat server for me so I don’t have to pay $8/mo anymore
But a Pi and recover the cost in under a year.
I would but I prefer a server hosted outside of my country.
That’s fair, though if you’re concerned to that degree I’d say a rando hosting it would be a silly move. That said, I realize that was a joke. ;P
As you mentioned Immich, Nextcloud and Radicale - don’t forget to make regular backups. If you haven’t automated them, that’s your next project now ;)
How do I set up backups for Immich, Nextcloud, and Radicale? I see lots of different options, I can’t pick!
I only host Nextcloud in an old setup (read pure PHP, MariaDB, Apache - no docker, etc.)
That server is set-up to be snapshotted daily. Also there’s a script running about 30 min before each snap shot that will also dump the database to disk (as otherwise the snapshot might contain a random state of the database). It’s not perfect, but it works - also because everything of this is done in the night, when I do not use the system, so chances are really low, that the snapshot of the disk and the database dump in it are not desynchronized too much.
I do not know what’s the best practice for a modern Nextcloud setup with docker is or how to handle the other two…
that seems quite important, I’ll do that then!
And don’t think that you can just back up using a file-copy process. These things have databases that also need to be backed up. It’s not as simple as it first seems.
Source: been selfhosting for an embarrassingly long time without any backup!
Just a quick add on: not only do and automate backups - do also test them every now and then.
Yes, back up your stuff regularly, don’t be like me and break your partition table with a 4 month gap between backups. Accomplishing 4 months of work in 5 hours is not fun.
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.
From what I have seen, oracle is not a good host. They randomly delete servers for no reason. I’d steer clear of oracle
I don’t trust oracle at all. The guide uses them because they’re free (It includes a business generator so that oracle doesn’t reclaim your box)
I personaly went with IONOS because they have a 2.99 plan with unlimited bandwidth which is great for pangolin as that’s routing traffic for my “media” box
That’s because they are free. You really do get what you paid for - or not in this case. It’s in the t&c’s too
