What things do you self host (or know about) that are fun/interesting/useful to you? I’m thinking of setting up a home server and am looking for things that would be useful or fun for me to run on it. I want to host things that are useful/fun, but not a project itself (I’ve got enough projects), if that makes sense.
Most of the lists I see online are mostly lists of technical projects like docker, kubernetes, grafana, nginx, etc. I see these as infrastructure rather than the interesting project itself. ETA: the infra is important, but not “interesting” in this context as I deal with infra at my day job.
Examples of the type of service I’m looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation… What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?
Edit: thank you everyone for your awesome responses!
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Maybe an IRC server/bouncer
RSSHub. Being able to get all my updates in one place changed how I view the internet for the better.
Here is my list:
- Open WebUI to have browser access to ollama
- AUTOMATIC1111 Stable Diffusion Web UI to generate images
- HomeAssistant to automate my home
- Immich to backup pictures from family phones and computers and make them accessible like Google Photos
- PeerTube to store and make accessible family videos
- PieFed to access the threadyverse
- Mastodon to do microblogging
- Uptime Kuma to check that all my services are up and running
- Synapse Matrix Server for Text, Video and audio chats with family and friends
- Syncthing to share files
FYI, A1111 is obsolete. The diffusers or comfy-based backends are way faster, richer, less buggy and support newer things.
I’d recommend UIs that support SVDQuant, in particular.
Could you give me a link to one of them?
Thanks a lot, I’ll check it out!
+1 for Home Assistant, though the Docker implementation doesn’t allow add-ons. That may be fine at first, but a lot of the more complicated setup requires add-ons. For me, it was worth it to just go ahead and grab an HA Green to run my HA stuff.
Yeah, I’m still running on my raspberry pi for that reason, and for my parents we also bought a HA green.
Or just a VM running Home Assistant OS. Works great for me in ProxMox.
Adguard Home, with domain pointed to it and using it as Private DNS on Android. No more ads anywhere!
Examples of the type of service I’m looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation… What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?
I use:
- Immich for photo hosting
- Jellyfin and navidrome for media (video and audio)
- Calibre and calibre-web for ebooks
- Minecraft server
- Mealie for recipes.
- Home assistant for automation
- Habitica for habit forming
- And I have fpp for my Christmas lights (the application is xlights, fpp is the server that runs the scripts)
All of these I like.
which habitica fork are you running at home? do you have the forked android app also? with home assistant, it’s all just so slick!
I’m running https://github.com/awinterstein/habitica/ and have built the android app locally to get access. I really need to update and build it again eventually.
It’s not seamless, but it functions for the family.
yayy habitica twinsies
I see these as infrastructure rather than the interesting project itself.
Well, you kind of have to have the infrastructure to make the fun happen. Docker is probably one of the more easy to deploy from the standpoint of someone just standing up a server.
- media server: Navidrome is what I use, but there are a plethora of choices
- photos app: Immich is quite popular, but again there are a list of them
- game servers: There are several that I know of like Doom , Minecraft, iirc there is a Quake server, I think you can integrate Steam. I can’t run games because of a seizure condition, but maybe others can chime in.
- home automation: HomeAssistant, NodeRed, N8N, Ansible, just literally tons of automation
These and thousands of other apps can be deployed via Docker. You don’t have to use docker, you can install on bare metal as well, tho containers make things neat and tidy.
As far as ‘fun’, to me it’s all fun. I selfhost for the utility, privacy, security, and anonymity of it, the educational part of it, and because it’s fun. My version of fun is going to vary widely from yours probably, but I find learning quite fun. Sky’s the limit pretty much.
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For LLM hosting, ik_llama.cpp. You can really gigantic models at acceptable speeds with its hybrid CPU/GPU focus, at higher quality/speed than mainline llama.cpp, and it has several built in UIs.
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LanguageTool, for self run grammar/spelling/style checking.
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Your own wiki, and your own social media-type service
I post miscellaneous notes to my social media-type service, and save lists and more organised information (including recipes) to my wiki.
I haven’t gotten to hosting my own wiki, but i do host an internal-only personal knowledge static site built with hugo. I have it set to build the site on my server which then serves it. Very useful to have something like that or a wiki.
I used to do it that way too, but my wife is not technically inclined, so we settled on something with a web UI for editing.
There are a few areas where the wiki is marginally better for me, the main one being the ability to do quick edits from a smartphone.
I do really like the simple approach with a static site builder thoughOut of curiosity what wiki are you hosting? I have a community that we were thinking about moving our docs to a wiki to be more accessible to non tech savvy people wanting to contribute
wiki.js
It has a few UI editor options, but I can definitely recommend the WYSIWYG markdown editorThanks, I’ll take a look!
Home Assistant might be of interest.
Additionally, pi hole, Immich, and things based on your hobbies might be fun. I recently started hosting a Grafana service to send my garmin data to since I like seeing my health data. I know you didn’t want grafana, but using a hobby as an example. What are some of your hobbies?
AdventureLog is pretty cool. Pairs with Immich nicely too.
Paperless NGX is awesome. Of course Immich. I also really like Firefly-iii and Home Assistant.
I started with NextCloud, mainly so I can start synchronizing Joplin notes. Maybe I could hook it up to also sync Logseq?
I chose this VTT because it’s dead simple and description on owlbear legacy did not sound encouraging
Then, on my list I have
If you want to get straight to the fun, I might recommend: https://cosmos-cloud.io/
It will handle all of the uninteresting stuff like docker, reverse proxies, ssl certificates, etc. You can get straight to adding apps either by pasting in a docker-compose, or getting them straight from the cosmos marketplace.
Also, it works with standard tools, so other than the reverse proxy, it’s easy to migrate away from if you want. I think the reverse proxy is just caddy, but I don’t know where the caddy config file goes or how to pull it out of the funky cosmos config format.
Off the top of my head:
- Paperless ( Digital filing cabinet, tagging is local LLM backed
- Immich (Google Photos replacement)
- Nextcloud (Replaces the rest of Google Cloud functionality)
- LubeLogger (Vehicle maintenance logger)
- Home Assistant (Home and other things automation)
- Jellyfin (Primary media server)
- Hoarder (Online bookmarking, tagging and summarizing service, Local LLM backed. I think this project has changed names)
- Audiobookshelf ( Does what it says on the tin. Audiobook server, kinda like audible but I can actually find the books I already own. )
- Navidrome (Not sure if I’m keeping this one. Like the features but it largely duplicates the music side of Jellyfin)
- Minecraft Server (Again, does what it says on the tin)
There are other services I run but those are the ones I use most often and can rattle off when I’m as tired as I am right now.
+1 for Audiobookshelf, has a great android app too
And iOS app as well, though, it is in test flight
FWIW, Plappa works really well on iOS. It’s not the official ABS app, but it was obviously designed around ABS. It has all of the features as the official app, without the whole “try every month to get into the TestFlight beta, because TestFlight hard caps the user count” BS.
Hoarder is now Karakeep
I much prefer navidrome for music over jellyfin. Better presentation and usage, tracks meaningful data and displays it by default, and won’t delete your music library data if a folder gets moved. In other words jellyfin just gets rid of that data but navidrome will track missing songs and make you explicitly confirm removing them from the database.
I use FinAmp client with Jellyfin for music.
I agree the Jellyfin interface is not well optimized for music, but FinAmp negates most of that and my phone is how I mostly listen to music anyway.
I like Navidrone, but it’s a duplicate service that doesn’t really have a big value add over Jellyfin beyond the ability to share tracks with friends. A major feature upgrade, but not something I use terribly often.
Fair enough, i mostly use symfonium so same thing since both jellyfin/navidrome support subsonic API. I do like using the navidrome web ui on PC though
Couple of things I have running on my home server no one has mentioned yet.
FoundryVTT is a self-hostable platform for playing tabletop RPGs online. It supports a vast selection of game systems and user/community developed mods making it extremely versatile.
Pihole is probably something you’ve heard of before and despite the name is hostable on a wide variety of systems. In case you haven’t it’s a network level ad blocker that works by taking over the role of DNS server on your LAN and blocking queries to domains used to serve ads or track telemetry.
How difficult is it to set up FoundryVTT? I heard they changed some things recently but I’m very out of the loop
Depends on what part of “set up” you’re referring to. Getting the software itself up and running is extremely easy. They have versions available for the full swathe of experience levels from “here is a packaged Electron based Windows application” to “here are the node.js source files”. All prior versions are also available if you have specific needs for an earlier version.
Now, if you mean how difficult is it to set up and run a game, that’s going to vary wildly depending on the system the game uses and how complex of a scenario whoever is running the game wants to deal with. There are lots of off-the-shelf one shots or campaigns you can run where that setup is already done for you though.
Ah ok, I was mostly talking about hosting Foundry itself but that sounds promising if it’s relatively easy. I have some stuff set up but I’m very inexperienced when it comes to hosting etc
They have fairly reasonable guides on their site on how to host for others.
- media: jellyfin for videos, navidrome for music
- photos: immich
- game servers: +1 to foundryvtt if you’re into tabletop rpgs. While the core software isn’t open source, most systems are, and the pf2e system in particular is the best virtual tabletop experience you’ll have on any platform.
- recipes: i settled on tandoor. Very much a fan of it.
- if you’re a data nerd then chartdb for database diagraming, and cloudbeaver for database management
Tandoor: I ended up there because it has an API that I can access and cross-reference to my grocer (Kroger.com also has API) to get current pricing, calculate recipe costs, nutrient costs, or find what’s on special this week. It’s theoreticcally possible, but I haven’t sorted out how to integrate that directly into tandoor & its shopping lists.
Nice! I haven’t dug into the API yet. The big thing for me was actually pretty small feature but tandoor let’s me scale recipes up and down on the fly with just a click of a button. I couldn’t find that in Mealie. We do a lot of home cooking for guests and large parties so being able to quickly see the portions and scale a recipe up/down saves a lot of mental math or errors.
Edit: though looking at mealie demo again i see some recipes let you adjust the serving. But others do not.
Edit 2: seems to be related when ingredients aren’t parsed
