Self-hosters! Share your reasons for self-hosting and favorite apps!
Self-hosting has been a rabbit hole of wonder that I've explored and delved into over these past few months. I'm curious to hear what others use it for, what apps they love, and their rationale for doing so?
I'll go first.
First, in terms of rationale, this is a wonderful article that I think is worth checking out that encapsulates much my of ethos about pursuing self-hosting.
https://kylechayka.substack.com/p/essay-the-digital-death-of-collecting
The TL;DR is that we no longer have control over the things that we 'own' digitally for these massive cloud companies. For instance the songs / artists you listen to on Spotify may suddenly and unexpectedly become unavailable, certain things (most recently podcasts) may be forced upon you in unpleasant ways. Having complete control of your digital data is a very liberating feeling.
In terms of apps:
Hyperbackup - I use a synology NAS, so hyperbackup has been wonderful and use both external HD's and a cloud interface to create encrypted backups of everything which gives me peace of mind.
Plex - One of my most used apps, being able to stream anything remotely has been a dream. Plexamp has given me back control of my music library in a way I never thought I would have.
Tautulli - Great for more informatics on my plex usage
Calibre / Calibreweb - Phenomenal for keeping track of my book collections
PiHole - Ads be gone!
*Arr apps - Specifically Sonarr/Prowlarr/Radarr, really like Overseerr for an interface tying everything together
Daily Notes - A clean interface for keeping regular notes
Some things that I'm not currently self-hosting but would love to hear if others are using alternatives...
Instapaper - I know there are a few similar FOSS apps out there but haven't found one as convenient and well laid out
TickTick - To do app, but similarly haven't found a FOSS alternative that was as robust and nice to use
OneNote
I run a good selection of stuff on my home server; I wrote it all out in an earlier comment, just scroll down a bit for the full list.
That said, here are the things I find myself interacting with daily.
Homer - Really nice "homepage" for all your self-hosted webapps. Has support for "live" data from some things like pihole, tatulli, heathchecks, etc.
TheLounge - Responsive, modern IRC web client. I still hang out in like 10 irc networks. This has single-handedly replaced my decade-old and oh-so-cozy mixture of ZNC and hexchat/weechat. I lost scripting but in return I get scrollback and a media-ready UI that looks nice on every device I own.
Miniflux - RSS reader with a simple, clean interface that lets me enjoy the web again. RSS feeds are getting harder to find but I still have 25 or so sites that I want to read content from and this app makes it a positive experience.
Kavita + Kavita-eMail - My main home for managing, reading, and sending ebooks to my kindle. It has a lovely UI that loads quickly even with 300+ books. The in-browser reader mode is miles ahead of calibre-web for the occasional cookbook lookup and I just setup the email middleware so my family can send books to their eReaders. I still use calibre-web for ingestion of new books but everything else is carried by kavita.
Scrutiny - Hard drive health monitor. Does occasional testing along with constant SMART health observation for all my drives. If anything goes bad, it'll send alerts to my email, telegram, and discord so I can move quickly when a drive starts to break down.
Gonic - Subsonic API compatible music server. I recently moved all my music from my aging PC over to my sever. Now I just listen to my tunes using the nicest subsonic client my device supports. (Sonixd for windows, iSub for iOS)
Fellow Subsonic user here :)
This thing has clients for everything - mobile (I use Ultrasonic), PC (Clementine on Windows/Linux/Mac), even Raspberry Pi (Volusonic plugin for Volumio). It's so much better to have a centralized music management than to mount large filesystems on various devices and have that scanned on each at every change in the music library.
I use Navidrome, which has a web player included too. And autoscans for changes (although that may be flaky for large libraries). It is also available as a Qnap app and this is how I use it - on a low powered Qnap TS-133, without the overhead of their docker implementation.
I can second Miniflux! I mainly use it for subscribing to a couple Tildes groups, some webcomics, a few blogs, and YouTube channels (so I don't find myself accidentally getting sucked into YouTube when checking my subscriptions feed). I use it through the Google Reader API and NetNewsWire on my phone, and the web interface on desktop. It works great, no issues so far!
Wow, thanks for these recommendations! I’ll definitely be trying out Homer, Miniflux, and Kavita.
Just wanted to add a quick plug for my desktop client Supersonic! I used Sonixd myself but my main impetus to start writing my own client was the lack of (true) gapless playback in Sonixd, and also infinite scrolling. (Sonixd's successor Feishin also has both now, but has also dropped support for the Subsonic API in favor of Navidrome's native API)
(I'm active on Tildes under a different account, but want to keep it pseudonymous, so I'll use this new account for personally-identifiable things)
Wow! That is a kind of madness, one that I respect. What an incredible project! There is zero sarcasm here; this is just astounding. Thanks for telling us about it!
While not an app to serve myself, per se. I'd say that Hashicorp Nomad and Traefik are both applications that are really fun to use. My "homelab" is a consumer desktop that has a bunch of WD Red drives stuffed into it and I use Nomad as a deployment platform with Traefik mapping subdomains to hosted applications. Nomad in general is much easier to work with than k8s.
So far I have hosted:
The FoundryVTT instance draws my license out of a Vault instance that runs on the same box. The underlying OS is NixOS and that has its own codebase as well.
Oh, and if anyone has any knowledge base / wiki recommendations than please let me know! I like documentation and I need a place to store it. I am an Emacs user but I think I prefer web interfaces for wikis.
I've been meaning to find a better way to orchestrate my dozen or so containers. I've been using some other pieces of the HC stack for a while now (Packer, Terraform, Vault, Vagrant) so I think implementing Nomad is going to be my Sunday project.
Thanks for the inspiration!
I found MediaWiki to be both familiar and easy to maintain. Since you’re on NixOS I can share my config.
I’ll try to remember to add it soon™️.Not the cleanest setup, but here it is:There are only a few things I host that we commonly use:
Now, while it isn't something that I actually selfhost, Tailscale is something I'd heavily recommend to anyone who isn't using it. Just a very, very convenient mesh VPN for ie SSHing into a server from our phone, from any network, and quickfixing + restarting something that's broken.
Ooh, yeah, Tailscale is VERY convenient for setting up SSH. It was relatively easy to setup and didn't require exposing 22 to the internet.
The reason for self hosted: My PC is on most of the time, I don't like a lot of the EULAs that come with the likes of Google (we're the product!) and FOSS is awesome. How wholesome is it that people like you and I can help others and all share to make the human race a little better, selflessly?
As for tools, I use Jellyfin and the *arrs, for home media managent, along with Jellyseerr for media requests. I still pay for Netflix and Disney, Amazon Video and VM cable at the moment but I'm sick of chasing shows and films and them randomly disappearing me.
I use NextCloud as my phone backup for pics and video, plus easy access to docs and files that I keep on my NAS.
Everything is then backed up (excluding high seas acquired movies and shows) to Backblaze B2 via Restic.
There's lots more I could be doing, but I'm bored of this stuff after doing it for nigh on 28 years so I do things for a reason more than fun now, although I enjoy the set up as I go.
I need to try to get nextcloud running again. I couldn't get my reverse proxy working right with it.
I selfhost out of curiousity and to be less dependent on companies that want to use and abuse me. It's also a great way to learn things as you go:
Vaultwarden to selfhost my passwords. Much easier then it looks like to selfhost.
Matrix Synapse server so I can have all my messengers (signal, whatsapp, telegram, steam) in one app. The way it works is via the bridges you can install. Also use it for my rss feeds.
Adguard Home for my private DNS and adblocking needs. Works great with the private DNS option on Android.
Public nitter, libreddit and invidious instances because I like those frontends better and I wanted to see the impact of hosting high traffic services on my machine.
There are a few things I might be forgetting. In the coming weeks I'm looking to get back into Plex or an alternative, I want to create a private radio station, setup a private masto server so I can join multiple instances and start orientating on backing up private photos and videos properly. Also might look at LLM's but at the moment there is no rush.
I'm in the middle of moving around my stuff since most of it is running on some raspberry pis that I'll be moving to a new NUC soon since there's some things that are just too much for a pi so those are running on a VPS or my own PC right now, which is bit of a mess, but I'm working on it :p
Things I host:
Also two discord bots I wrote~
I'm switching to a NUC soon as I'm currently immich, which is quite alpha, but a very good photo sync/managing program on a VPS and I'd rather that locally, as well as wanting to run a jellyfin server somewhere dedicated instead off my PC.
My reasons for self hosting is probably the same as a lot of people, I don't like trusting my things to big companies, be it the data itself or just avoiding the annoyance of these companies going out of business and losing my stuff.
I can't say much about storage, my use case is very simple so I just use the default "sqlite on the server" setting and mostly use it with bash or python scripts via curl requests or using the
requestslibrary with python.I will say on the reliability though, I've been using it for... 3 or so years and never once had any sort of problem that I can recall, it is beautifully simple :3
I mostly self host because it just feels weird to me to outsource computers to other people when I have perfectly good computers right here. I can spin a story about taking control of my data, but it's really post hoc justification. Secondarily, I can (and sometimes do) patch software when it's almost but not quite what I want.
While typing this list out, I discovered that using software in ways that are adjacent to their purpose but not quite as intended seems to be my thing.
I run all of this in Docker on a headless desktop in the corner of my home office.
Zipline - Imgur changed policy and doesn't allow anonymous uploads anymore. I need my own image host, and I wanted one with a nice UI, a database, and ShareX compatibility.
I self-host a ton of stuff, but Nextcloud is a fundamental lynch-pin enabling lots of other very important things like contacts, calendar and todo and anything else that can use WebDAV.
I've used Nextcloud for receiving files from friends (an open drag-and-drop file upload page let me collect 40+ 'Happy Birthday' videos from all of my partner's friends, during lockdown, with almost not effort beyond circulating a URL and asking people to pass it on).
It also lets me sync data for all sorts of things across multiple machines - from my
.bashrcand.ssh/config(simply symlinked to text files in~/Nextcloud) to more complicated scenarios like sharing my Freetube config dir and all my subscriptions, watched videos, etc across from my desktop to my media center PCs, as well as being able to easily transfer xml exports/imports to/from Newpipe on my phone to keep that lined up too ( albeit via manual export/import).Edits: just tidying up SPAG
Most of my self-hosted stuff is on an Intel NUC that I bought back in early 2019. That purchase was initially made so that I could have a low-power always-on Linux system on the home network for random odds and ends - such as running a PiHole server for the local network.
As of more recently it's graduated into acting as a media server running Jellyfin and various *Arr apps as I found myself getting very, very tired of the lack of predictable content availability on streaming services.
Overall the system is working very well and was a purchase that I've been extremely happy with. At some point I need to make some improvements to my media storage approach as the current "solution" for that is two USB disks that I had lying around in a drawer for who-knows-how-long plugged into the NUC and balanced at a file-level via mergerfs. Not the greatest setup, but it did cost me absolutely nothing to get running and was a good excuse to reuse those drives.
I've also got a bottom-tier DigitalOcean VPS for things that need to be always-online and remotely accessible in a pinch; which at the moment is just limited to a (secondary) Git and Subversion server for personal projects. Have been tempted to also set up a Wireguard server on there and peer it with the NUC to give me remote access to home resources, but I don't yet have a definite need for that.
I have an Unraid server with the following that I've been running since the start of 2021:
I self host because one of my 2023 New Year resolutions was to take back as much control of my data as possible. Here's what I'm hosting atm:
I'm still on the hunt for a Journaling app I can self host. I actually just started a thread over here if anyone has ideas. Also on the hunt for a server-to-cloud backup solution that a dummy/novice like me can wrap my head around and backup the important stuff to my B2 buckets.
I’ve been running a Synology ds918 for about 5 years. Focus is around Plex and all the things that go into automoting the tv/movies/music downloading and keeping one place. All mostly running in docker
Then some reverse proxies on the nas and some cloud syncing etc.
Sooo....
I have homemade NAS running on i5-4670k (running on base clock) with 3x 4TB 7200rpm drives in mdadm software RAID5. I use this RAID as home folder for all users, on each desktop PC there is just SSD with OS (Linux) and games (Steam), all personal things go over ethernet.
So it's:
Why not Plex you ask? Because I hate having internet account for something that I actually run on my hardware at my home. Also Plex din't start after reboot even when set so, while Jellyfn did... :-D Kodi has add-ons for both of them and Plex' is better, but Jellyfin's is just like if the library was actually on the RPi itself (meaning I access the files right through Kodi), not on server.
And why Jellyfin? Because I was fed uo with searching for DVDs and Blu rays and switching them over in PS3. So I ripped all of them, almost 250 discs. I'm the kind that doesn't have subscription to streaming service, I like to spend my moneyon actual thing. I buy Blu ray, I rip it and then shovenit in the closet where it spends the rest of my life. Inpaid for it, I own it and I'm morally at peace when I rip it and watch from my server.
I self-host because in some cases that is my only option. :) In addition to the more standard things that others have already mentioned, I'm running a few homemade containerized tools on my network. At the moment:
Anybody else running anything more bespoke?
I have a small VPS with a few services
Is there any reason that you don't use Syncthing?
I actually use Syncthing too, but not on my VPS, and for less important data.
Since I share some files with my wife, these criteria made me choose Resilio:
I self host a pi hole. I run it on a small thin client running arch. Not the best but it works. I mostly self host because it’s fun. It’s fun taking care of everything, and I don’t see ads anymore.
I keep it pretty minimal - I have an unraid NAS for backups and storage of video files that I am editing. It also has Jellyfin for media playback, Handbrake in a docker container for doing mass transcoding without tying up my laptop, Photoprism for pictures and pihole.
I've only recently started self-hosting so my setup isn't quite there yet, but I'm enjoying it so far -- I like the feeling of owning my own web services. I run a VPS with Hetzner for about 4EUR a month.
The reasons are mostly ideological -- self-hosting is decentralisation in its purest form, and though it's unrealistic for most people, I think it's the best way to truly own your data and prevent the situation we're facing now.
A little bit about what I'm running:
Wireguard: Instead of exposing everything to the internet, I can keep some things unexposed and just access them through a VPN. I don't have it set it for through routing, though.
NGINX: A simple reverse proxy setup, SSL certs downloaded and set to renew with Certbot. I found this way easier to work with than Traefik: the latter is a bit of a black box, and I was easily confused by manual configurations.
Docker: everything that isn't the above is self-contained in /opt/docker. Everything is in one compose file, and I use volumes as needed to link to folders in /opt/docker/containers/[service]. Everything is in host networking mode as UFW doesn't play nicely with Docker's port exposure, and I don't need Docker's networking capabilities anyway.
Linkding: Bookmarking service, much nicer to use and more organised than the one in my browser so will probably be using it from now on.
Radicale: I use Proton for my main email, which has no CalDAV support because CalDAV itself doesn't support E2EE. My threat model isn't as strict as Proton's, so I spun up a separate CalDAV server.
More will be coming; Vaultwarden will likely be next.
Lot of good suggestions in here, thanks so much! I've been on the lookout for something like Imgur, for images and galleries, that I could maybe share with friends to also upload to. Do any of you have any suggestions for this?
Unsure if you've seen it, but the awesome-selfhosted list is usually where I start with "I want to run something in this category, what are my options" type projects.