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!
Self hosting nothing changed my life.
So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅
It’s disappointing that this is the highest voted comment on a thread in the selfhosted topic…
I don’t know. I think it speaks to something that we sometimes forget. Self hosting is great, but there’s a bit of time and commitment that’s needed for almost everything. Most people are used to single click, always works apps. Doing your own building, diagnostics, troubleshooting, and deployment can be a headache that’s too much for some people.
It’s really the phrasing “average joe”. I would genuinely give the average Joe a strong recommendation to not self host.
A beginner wanting to learn to be more techy and willing to put in hours for troubleshooting etc? Sure go ahead. But thats definitely not the average Joe.
My biggest advice to a beginner would be to buy a spare budget router, plug it into your ISP router, plug your pc into the new router and do all your messing around in your own network.
Break the internet because of bad configure? No stress, it’s only your little network, your flatmates/family aren’t yelling at you.
Can’t figure out what you did wrong and want the internet back to search? Just plug your pc back to the untouched ISP router so you get internet again
I always compare self hosting to PC gaming: it has some very specific benefits, but you don’t even comprehend, how many downsides you will encounter you cannot even start to anticipate. If one doesn’t like the pain a little bit theses hobbies aren’t any good and I totally understand everyone giving up on them.
Self hosting is much closer to gaming on Linux than Windows imo, but it’s a great analogy nevertheless.
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.
Why though? Just host it in your private network and use a VPN for occasional syncing.
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Vaultwarden is super easy. I’ve not had a single problem with it and I’ve been running it for a couple years.
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This is a great one and to add it also allows for secure notes, 2FA and sending files securely.
I second this, bonus points if you get a domain through Cloudflare and use their tunnel service to access shrike away from home!
PiHole!
One of the easiest installer I’ve ever seen. Significantly less ads to be shown especially one on non-browser.
This was my gateway into the selfhosting world. I don’t think I would’ve kept going if it didn’t make such drastic difference to my browsing experience.
Any reason to use PiHole over something like Adguard DNS?
For me, at least, is a custom CNAME DNS record. I’ve both internal (point to device directly) and external (via reverse proxy) domains. I use a CNAME record to point the external domain back to the internal one for my local split DNS. Technically it can be applied on Adguard; not as easy as PiHole though.
As far as changed your life, there are not too many that i really love, that made a massive difference to how i do things. But there is one:
Paperless_ngx
ALL of my paper work, receipts, transcripts, tax, shares, council rates. Everything goes in there. We no longer have paper lieing everywhere (well, my wife is another matter, still keeps grocery shopping reciepts…). when i get soimething in the mail, i used the paperless app to “scan” it, upload it, then bin the paper.
An actual life change that i didn’t know i needed.
Oh nice, thanks!
Why is this better for you than using a folder structure with a decent naming convention? I’ve tried to get started a couple times, but I just haven’t managed to get what’s better about it. I know i’m missing something, and I feel like if I knew what it is i’d be more likely to out in the work to transition.
Is it possible for the scans to be stored as files that are readable should paperless crash and I’m not around to get it up and running, or are files stored as weird non-standard file formats?
edit: looks like scans are saved as pdf’s. Thanks for the insight!
It creates searchable PDFs, so no weird format locked to paperless-ngx
The files are stored in a directory and you can define the default path with an environment variable ( file-name-handling ). If you need a more fine graint solution you can also use storage paths and select it on file level ( storage-paths ). I’m using syncthing to sync the folder structure to my other devices.
Commenting here to save this and also to create engagement.
did you know that you can save a post, by clicking the star?
also, appreciate the engagement :D
How is your work flow from scanning to paperless? Does it support some kind of upload folder?
That looks really cool. At the moment I scan everything with OneDrive, and sync it with my NAS. However, it doesn’t have e.g. OCR features, it’s pretty basic. Will have a look, thanks!
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.
immich
Did they just nick the Google Photos UI?
Yes its basically selfhosted Google Photos instance kinda thing. There is a great story the Dev shared once, he was paranoid about backing up things to Google or Apple cloud as they have history of sharing it with Feds. So Dev won’t like his family pictures on such platforms, so when him and his partner were to have a baby, he started working on immich, so by the time baby arrives he’ll have a safe platform to backup family pictures.
If the logo said “Photos” I can be sure some couldn’t see a difference between it and GPhotos
Wow!! Immich looks great. I’ll be getting that going asap. I actually just started paying for Google drive just to have more space for photos and videos. I’ve always wanted to move over to using my server but I just couldn’t find a great Google photos alternative. This looks perfect.
Plex is a far better and user friendly version than jellyfin or emby in my experience especially if you want to share to friends. Granted it’s not open source and has gone commercial route so there is the risk it will continue there. But for now I wouldn’t push to move. If jellyfin can get some more app support and continue to develop and be ready for when Plex messes up then it will take off.
True for users who are already setup with Plex, for them there is no reason to switch as of now, but for a person starting from scratch and setting up things for the first time, it makes a lot of sense to get Jellyfin instead of going Plex. As Plex is moving away from their core of making user’s media available for streaming, and rather focuses in pushing its own streaming content (I know we can toggle that behavior off but it is headache fot new comers, and it should be off by default and if a person likes they can turn on Plex’s streaming content, default should be the user’s content)
A headache? All you need to do is tick a box when you first open the app. There it asks you how you’d like your home screen to look
hey my uncle died pressing that check box
if you want to share to friend
Not if they need their own Plex Pass for so many features. The only thing Jellyfin lacks is user self password resets and transcoded downloads. I don’t really see any other advantages in Plex
Transcoded downloads are a pretty big deal unless you want to stream 4K blue ray HDR to your iPhone.
Does jellyfin handle audiobooks? For some reason I found the service lacking a couple of years ago, but can’t remember why.
So I got Plex pass and really enjoy it. The Prologue app gives you an audible-like interface for audiobooks that I love. Plexamp for music and Plex Dash to monitor the server. Audnexus matches audiobooks to Audible listings for the metadata. Plex movies and tv match to get metadata, trailers, behind the scenes, cast list, and rotten tomatoes reviews. If Plex ever gets too commercialized/restricted for some reason I’ll switch, but for now I couldn’t be happier.
As far as I know there is basic audiobook support. But I have no clue, because I don’t use it. If I used Audiobooks I wouldn’t be using Jellyfin for them anyway
Transcoded downloads are a pretty big deal unless you want to stream 4K blue ray HDR to your iPhone.
Where do you store your duplicati backups?
I follow the rule of 3 for backups. So I keeps 3 copies of things I like to back up.
- Original (Drive 1)
- Duplicati backups (Sent to drive 2 - Same Machine)
- Using Syncthing I sync The Backup Folder in Drive 2 to a remote Machine
Where do you store your duplicati backups?
Where are your remote backups? In your secpnd house?
No as I shared I only use a remote machine (which is my old laptop converted to NAS) (2nd house is a dream as of now 🙈)
On a serious note as Duplicati backups can be encrypted, you can use remote Machine, backup to a machine in 2nd house as Syncthing works over relays for remote locations as well, or you can also send encrypted backups to cloud like Gdrive, Dropbox, etc.
Noob here, duplicati is awesome, but I saw some posts about corrupted backups etc so i switched to cmd kopia
This reminds me of my posts on reddit 3 months prior, it all started with Noob here🤣, so even I am a noob. Or you can say you are on Lemmy and not reddit, so I wont call you or myself a noob anymore, as noobs are still on reddit😉.But we all learn bits with time. I read those posts too, but gave it a shot anyway and its been 4 months of using Duplicati, still running without any issues.
I do randomly test it as well, but copy/pasting my stuff and then deleting it from original location, and use Duplicati to restore and works well everytime. I did those tests every 7days for 1st month, but after that it has been 3 months where I do similar tests randomly either 20 days or monthly. And still doing good.
Key part to remember while Duplicati is Versioning, I keep atleast 5 versions of backup (daily backups), and the things I backup are mainly Photos or password manager data. So even if I get a corrupted back up and even lose my system. I’ll still have the 4 other backups which ain’t very old, as its daily backups with 5 versions so, 1 backup per day for last 5 days. So 90% chances are I won’t lose the data, but in case even if I do it would negligible.
Hehe. I cant feel like not noob in this community lol. Honestly I still use duplicaty along with kopia for most critical files and they go to google drive encripted. Kopia does backup of all files to another drive and B2 cloud. Duplicaty is so perfect to use, such a shame someone brought fear in the room 🤣
Noob here, duplicati is awesome, but I saw some posts about corrupted backups etc so i switched to cmd kopia
Would you rate CasaOS over something like ProxMox? I know there is a difference in purpose, since ProxMox is about virtualization and CasaOS is about easy hosting of docker instances.
Do you have an opinion on what is better in the long run for self-hosting?
Is you like to run Multiple OS/VMs on single machine, then Proxmox is your goto, hands down.
CasaOs is more for people like me, who runs a single OS baremetal and like to have multiple docker instances on that same OS. Basically you need a baremetal Debain or supported Linux OS on which you install CasaOS.
CasaOs is more like portainer on steroids, as it offers you Appstore like interface to get one click Docker container installation. But also offers you control (for more advanced users) where if you like you can manager containers and can have terminal/ssh access along with option to change default volume maps set by CasaOS.
One such similar thing to CasaOS is UmbrelOS, please do avoid that, as it only offers one click installations of docker containers with default volume maps (with no way for you to change it) And it lacks all the advanced features to manage containers like in CasaOS. Atleast CasaOs keeps those options hidden away, so once you become a little advanced you can access it.
Also look into Yunohost and Cosmos if you decide to go that route.
I’ll surely checkout Cosmos, as for Yunohost I tried its great but I liked GUI of CasaOS better.
Is you like to run MultipleVMs on single machine, then Proxmox is your goto, hands down.
CasaOs is more for people like me, who runs a single OS baremetal and like to have multiple docker instances on that same OS. Basically you need a baremetal Debain or supported Linux OS on which you install CasaOS.
CasaOs is more like portainer on steroids, as it offers you Appstore like interface to get one click Docker container installation. But also offers you control (for more advanced users) where if you like you can manager containers and can have terminal/ssh access along with option to change default volume maps set by CasaOS.
One such similar thing to CasaOS is UmbrelOS, please do avoid that, as it only offers one click installations of docker containers with default volume maps (with no way for you to change it) And it lacks all the advanced features to manage containers like in CasaOS. Atleast CasaOs keeps those options hidden away, so once you become a little advanced you can access it.
Cool. That might be the better route than virtualization, since basically every self-hosting project seems to use docker anyways.
Of course I can just virtualize CasaOS…
Does duplicati have to do periodic full backups?
I’ve used borgbackup / borgmatic. One full backup and only incrementals thereafter.
Swinger parties?
I had exactly the same thought 😆
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
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.
*ruin your year
It’s very easy to back up and encrypted vault to the cloud. Also all bitwarden clients save your info locally, so you wouldn’t lose your vault unless everything you had logged into it with was destroyed simultaneously.
It’s been a while since I last checked Vaultwarden (back then it was still called bitwarden-rs). If they added an export feature, then that definitely makes things easier. The export feature in the client isn’t enough IMO. Last time I tried it, it didn’t export attachments. So if you for example have your SSH key saved in Bitwarden, well then good luck if you loose access to the vault :P
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.
I would look at this https://youtu.be/uaixCKTaqY0 in regards to nginx proxy manager. It might not apply to you but worth knowing at least.
Shame NPM is so easy to use compared to Traefik. I just bash my head against the wall if I try to use Traefik for anything but local docker containers. Point it at an external service? I would rather shoot myself
I actually find traefik rather nice to work with. I have a few Middleware chains set up, expose service using labels and add the chains to make sure I get the appropriate settings.
If you only use it with your local containers than sure, I have a similar setup myself. But if I try to break from that prison…
Actual Budget I use to track my finance.
Duplicacy for backups to OneDrive and Backblaze
Photoprism as Google replacement
Immich is also a great Google Photos alternative. Though it is in active development and things may break, I’ve been thoroughly impressed by it.
Welp, I went down the wonderful hole of Actual today. Thank you for that!
Let’s see if it takes over from my xls. I’m liking it. It’s quick and I see lots of potential.
My problem with Actual Budget is it’s only a singular currency. I deal with Euro, Dollar, Romanian Lei, British Pound. Having to manually convert each to Dollar, and then have a bit of discrepancy due to price fluctuations made it a no go for me. Have not found a good self hosted finance tracker that works for me yet.
At the moment I am unfortunately using a proprietary one called Cubux.For what its worth, Firefly supports multiple currencies, hell I even see a few crypto currencies in the list haha.
Actual Budget looks fantastic. And they claim they’ll implement direct import soon. I need a YNAB alternative
I’ve been hunting for a YNAB equivalent and alternative for years since they went subscription based. This looks to fill that hole.
Actual Budget looks fantastic. And they claim they’ll implement direct import soon. I need a YNAB alternative
Yeah. My banks all work with direct import. Even banks that YNAB did not support.
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.
I should get back into RSS. I used to follow a ton of web comics way back in the day, but once google RSS shut down I never picked it back up. I’ll look into Miniflux, thanks.
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 2 search engines?
Because I can
Indeed, well:
- SearxNG is a meta search engine, can aggregate search results from a ton of other search engines (like DDG, Google, Bing, … and a lot more)
- Whoogle, looks like a proxy to Google
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.
WireGuard, helpful for accessing stuff on your internal network that you don’t want to expose while you’re out.
Tailscale is an easy way to get this setup too
+1 for Tailscale if one wants to get a private VPN up and running quickly.
And there is the opensource selfhosted implementation of that as well of course! https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
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
Years ago I selfhosted Nextcloud and found this interaction just as clunky as using google drive. Now I’m just using SFTP which has much less overhead and it integrates beautifully with just about any file manager on Linux. Then again, using it on windows is a pain as far as I know.
Do you happen to know if it can be installed on Docker for Windows?
While there is a docker version for windows (server I believe) the last time I checked it could only run windows containers (so basically none). The Linux support never got out of beta. I think now they are just saying use windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) for that.
I have been quite happy with docker on a Linux virtual machine hosted on a windows server (I know not the “normal” way to do it but since I am a windows Server admin at work it worked best for me).
The reason that you cannot run Linux containers on windows by default is that docker is no full fledged virtualization Software it sill uses the kernel of the host system. And a Linux container needs a Linux host system.
Here is a forum thread from the docker forum. You might find some valuable insights there: https://forums.docker.com/t/docker-run-linux-container-in-windows-2019/128196
WSL2 is Linux on a virtual machine. Docker for Windows is running in a VM.
I’m also a weirdo though, I’m using podman instead (and may switch to nerdctl).
I think there are two “Docker for Windows” one is docker desktop used on windows client OS where you can switch between windows and linux containers. This is the one where it runs a VM for the Linux containers but it’s designed for development and not so much for hosting (at least I have not get it to work for this)
And there is the docker that’s included in Windows Server wich can only run windows containers but those natively and suitable for hosting dotnet web services on scale.
Never hears of nerdctl. What is the feature that would make it better than podman for you?
I using and deploying to kubernetes. Nerdctl has a docker API but it’s completely backed by k8s. So, for regular dev I’d just need a k8s cluster and not k8s + something else to build the images and push them into the k8s image repository.
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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.
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 ;)
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.
Also worth noting, you don’t have to run an exit node. And there is also the alternative to run a bridge or just snowflake.
Also worth noting, you don’t have to run an exit node. And there is also the alternative to run a bridge or just snowflake.
Hosting a wedding has a pretty good chance to be life changing
I did this and it led to hosting a baby within my wife. Was pretty steep learning curve and now have zero downtime.
So, if I understand correctly it at least had life changing consequences.
