So, I am soon going to finally set up my first home server. Exams are not that far away, I am motivated as shit, my first own domain is bought and I want to level up my sysadmin skills.
Currently my plans look like this:
- Host Jellyfin
- Host my own NAS
- Some form of hosted musicstreaming integration with my local music
- Automate Backups and push them on my server
- make all of the above things available where ever I want using my own self hosted domain.
- run my own dns
In the long term I also want to be able to host my own webapps, since I will soon start to develop one for someone.
Now I want to know what suggestions do you have, for stuff thats really cool and that I can selfhost.
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Personally, I am running Nextcloud (file backup mostly. There’s a bunch of other options too if you don’t want the "all-in-one"ness of Nextcloud, but I find that it has good integration with lots of apps), Immich (the best photo backup there is), Radicale (my first one, Nextcloud already has similar functionality I think. I use DAVx5 on my phone for this, Thunderbird for desktop), Vikunja (to-do list app, partly compatible with CalDAV. I pair this with the Android app Tasks[dot]org and it works quite well), and Forgejo (local git backup, I still use codeberg for cloud backup though). I can strongly recommend all of them, they all work fantastic! Tailscale is also neat to set up if you want to access your local network remotely.
One fun thing you can do is set up a little Minecraft server for you, any siblings/cousins/other family you have or your roommate if you have one of those. I host one using PaperMC, it’s just a survival server for just me and my sibling, it’s quite nice!
Other people have already mentioned Home Assistant, but I personally haven’t used that. If you do have smart homey things though, it sounds really good!
I also have notes using Joplin, but I’m using Nextcloud to sync rather than Joplin Server!
Technitium dns (and dhcp) server instead of pihole maybe, with advanced blocking app.
Bentopdf if you deal with PDFs
Omni-tools if you need to convert between 2 formats or units
It-tools for the fun of it.
- pihole: DNS ad-blocker abd also a DNS (and optionally DHCP) server for your home
- Wireguard: VPN very simple to setup, for remote access to your services from outside your home. What I do: wireguard is running (as a server) on a VPS, with all the security measures in place (ssh password login turn off, firewall bocks everything but wireguard and ssh connection changed to another port, failban) then my NAS at home connects to this VPS, as well as my phone, laptop, etc.
- Caddy: reverse proxy to address your service using your domain, it’s easy to setup, actually it’s the only reverse proxy I managed to setup successfully 😅. You can use the Nameservers from your domain provider to point to your NAS via the wireguard IP address for connection from the outside, and Pihole DNS to point to local IP address when at home.
Since you’re running Jellyfin already, you can put your music in there and use an app like https://discrete.app/ on iOS or something comparable on Android for a better UX
Syncthing so you never have to mail files to yourself again.
FreshRSS for RSS reading
Readeck for saving articles for later (or wallabag, many alternatives)
HomeAssistant
Calibre-web for ebooks
PiHole
Joplin for self hosted notes
Searxng is fun for self hosted metasearch but has sadly been having trouble with Google lately
I remember reading a thread like this a while back and saw Home Assistant. I thought I don’t need that.
It’s probably the most used self hosted app we have.
I wish you didn’t have to do things the Calibre way to host ebooks, but whatever effort it takes to sort out ebook hosting must be a pain in the ass, because everything is built on top of Calibre despite Calibre being perhaps the most obtuse piece of “programmer-knows-better” software ever engineered.
Almost every other ebook self-hosted app is just a wrapper on top of that nonsense. I hate it.
You can try to use Komga instead, but it’s mostly meant for comic books and it’s kinda heavy, honestly.
It is a little convoluted how it’s set up, but I have a debt of gratitude to the Calibre community for their various add-ons freeing my legally purchased books of their DRM! Which is what enabled me to have centralized library in the first place, since they were all on different services. But now I’ve quit Amazon and have everything accessible from KOreader on my Kobo, via Calibre-web
There’s a reason Calibre-web is called Calibre-web. Calibre-web itself is a mitigation for how dumb Calibre is.
A lot of a very cool ecosystem is built on top of this one core piece of weirdness this one nerd made in his own alien mindspace and nobody likes any of the choices in there, but it’s inescapable now, precisely because all these other cool, important tools are built around it.
See also: Gnome.
Have you tried out https://booklore.org/ ?
It seems different enough from calibre and kavita et al.
Have I? I tried so many so quickly I can’t even remember.
In any case I’m part of the problem now, because my dealbreaker was having to organize my library in the obtuse alien way Calibre wants instead of the nice, human-readable way I already had. I bit that bullet, so now I’m married to a Calibre format library and thus perpetuating the terrible standard.
Export all fixes that… Doing that to my syncthing to sync my files to the ereader. Still looking for a way to get rid of calibre :(
Yeah, it’s hard exit that directory structure once you have gone all in.
A single user PieFed instance
I strongly recommend Overseerr if you are going to run a video server.
Forget piracy. I only host dumps of my physical media (which at least where I am is perfectly legal), but that thing has an database of international streaming soruces. I use it just as a watchlist and to check whether I have access to a thing on a commercial streaming service already. It is effectively Justwatch for your streaming media.
Immich is a pretty obvious thing, too, if you want to get out of commercial image hosting services.
I’d say, though, that’s a fairly ambitious plan, and if your self-hosted apps, your home webhosting and your NAS are all going to live on the same home server I’d certainly figure out security and backups before overcommitting. That plan is a lot of hard drives and failure points you’re gonna be wrangling.
This was merged with jellyseer and is just called seer now. I believe it’s ‘safe’ to switch to the develop branch they have available. I’ve had zero issues so far.
Hah. Good to know. I haven’t refreshed that container in a while and the data keeps populating just fine, so I hadn’t considered it. Makes a lot of sense to consolidate all the media server options into one package, though. I’ll take a peek at the new one.
Before you even start, consider adopting an ‘infrastructure as code’ approach. It will make your life a lot easier in the future.
Start with any actual code: If you have any existing source code, get it under git version control immediately, then prioritize getting it into a git hub like forgejo to make your life easier in the future. Make a git repository for your infrastructure documentation, and record (and comment/document too if you’re feeling ambitious) every command you run in a txt file or an md file or a script, and do that as religiously as you can while you’re setting up all this self-hosted stuff. You may want to dig it up later to try and remember exactly what you did or in case stuff goes wrong and you need to back off and try again. It might seem pointless now, but a year from now, you’ll thank me.
Especially prioritize getting your git stuff moved into a self-hosted forgejo if any of your stuff is hosted on the microsoft technoplague called github.
That’s a very good idea, will definitely do that.
Check out Selfh.st
Very good resource. Well written. I know nothing about him but does seem to have a great rapport with Lemmy SH.
ETA: I’m reluctant, but keen to know so, is there some ancient lore that prevents me from asking ‘Is there a reason why noted.lol doesn’t live here too?’ I searched and I did find a handful of references, but nothing like selfh.st.
You’re referencing the deep lore.
Noted.lol was around awhile before selfh.st and was actually pretty beloved on the SelfHosted subreddit. Then the guys behind selfh.st showed up and some of the people who were contributing to noted.lol started giving them a hard time for “copying” them or some nonsense like that. Lots of drama. Now you never really hear about noted anymore.
I kinda figured. Usually long standing comms/chans/subredits have ancient tomes that guide them. I actually find them both valuable resources.
- You want to go from the bottom of that list up. Do the boring before the fun or you’ll have to redo the fun to make it work right with the boring.
- PiHole. (After backups, before media apps)
Second this.
And I’ll add DietPi is great, easy to run wherever you want. I run it in its own VM on my ESXi box.
I’m running:
- Easy wire guard - https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy
- Plex - plexamp is fabulous for music
- Portainer
- Immich
- Arrs - prowlarr - sonarr - radarr - lidarr
- Cloudflared - for tunneling via cloud flare
I have pihole on a pi for DNS.
Isn’t wireguard already pretty easy???
Also unless it changed I thought Plexamp was only available to Plex Pass subscribers.
Plexamp - Nah they made it free for everyone a while back… the sonic analysis aspect is gare kept behind the pass. Iirc But I’m a lifetime pass holder for like a bazillion years … I think my annual average cost is like $4 at this point lol
Wg-easy - truth be told I just started it up this week. I formatted my phone and wanted to try something else for wire guard. But you are correct wire guard is pretty darn easy.
Invidious for YouTube without ads
What are the advantages of Invidious, compared to Piped?
I have been self-hosting Piped for the last 3 years, but I never tried Invidious.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network DNS Domain Name Service/System ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor Git Popular version control system, primarily for code IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) Plex Brand of media server package SSO Single Sign-On VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.
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Pihole and NAS are for sure goats of self-hosting, however I recommend at least try to host them for some time and figure out for yourself if you like that at all. Then add things as you go, whatever you need you may find options on awesome-selfhosted.
