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!
Struggling to read all the comments on mobile so apologies if this is a duplicate, but if you need recipes, Tandoor Recipes. I use it for hosting my own edits of recipes. Since I do baking streams it’s great for me to easily link to my stream for folks who want the same recipe including any tips I’ve added or variations, or something I’ve kinda come up with that’s based off a standard formula.
Plus, using the Kitshn app on a tablet makes for an absolutely gorgeous kitchen companion for reading recipes. Split screening it between the recipe and the chat has been awesome. For real, Kitshn is absurdly polished for an open source app.
- 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/
- 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
Gotta be better than being tracked everywhere… and of course I personally use a vpn (and encrypted traffic to the server)
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.
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 -
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If you have static IP4 or IPV6 - Setup Wireguard VPN on your homelab/server, and wireguard client on client devices[1].
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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/
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- 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
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.
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
I know. I’m just saying, don’t use them if you don’t want ot constantly reinstall your server
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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…
can I ask what is the advantage of radicale over nextcloud calendar sync?
I’m thinking about moving my Nextcloud calendars and addressbooks to Baikal. Why? Because I like one “tool for one thing” better than “one tool for everything”.
Small update: Today I moved to Baikal successfully.
It’s missing some features, I noticed.
- There are no shared addressbooks, so a shared user is needed. Addressbooks also cannot be read-only.
- There is no birthday calendar. There is a Python script for MySQL to run from cron. I ported it to PostgreSQL today.
that makes sense, not having all your eggs in one basket.
I hosted radicale first so already had my events sorted out. Wasn’t really bothered moving them again. Also, I like radicale, it’s simple and it works.
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
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?
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
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.
Hi, I’ve tried Actual Budget but I’ve found more interesting in terms of options Firefly, so I’ve chosen for it :)
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.
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.
Why Radicale when you have a caldav-capable calendar in NC?
I hosted Radicale first, so already had my calendar events and such set.
