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!
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
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 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
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)?
You sound kind of like me, but physical books are not my jam. I host a lot of things I use all the time. The most used app I selfhost is SearxNG. When you get it all set up, in your browser settings you can substitute DDG for your private SearxNG instance.
I host Obsidian which is a note taking app. It houses all my compose files, step by step tuts I’ve written to myself, interesting code snippets, etc. There are several encryption plugins for Obsidian that allow you to encrypt the document itself to keep it away from nosy people.
I host Readeck and Karakeep. These are bookmark type apps. I use Readeck for ‘read it later’ type articles I find are interesting. Karakeep I use for data preservation. Both can be used for both bookmarks and data preservation, I just keep 'em separated.
I host a lot more but that might get the juices flowing as it were.
How do you host Obsidian? Last time I checked, it only ran as a local install, so the “hosted” version was just a virtual machine running a local copy. Is it still that?
https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-obsidian
It uses the Kasm VNC. Takes a little to get used to, but it rocks.
If you’re just looking for something to chew up CPU cycles and don’t know what to host, consider something like BOINC where you’re “self-hosting” (extremely loose term) scientific research, like cancer, new drugs, etc.
Vaultwarden
I personally prefer keepass and really don’t trust my server to be secure enough with all my passwords…
Haha, I don’t trust my own server either, but I don’t trust anyone elses even more.
hence keepass :D
might set up syncthing too so I can sync my passwords p2p…
Paperless-ngx - it allows you to upload important documents like receipts, contracts, etc. and uses OCR so you can search them
Why Radicale when you have a caldav-capable calendar in NC?
I hosted Radicale first, so already had my calendar events and such set.
searchxng, libretranslate
It’s searxng but yes. That is a good suggestion.
I’m looking to get started with self hosting too. Could you share the links you used to get yourself set up?
Radicale’s official documentation didn’t help me much, so I followed some youtube video (by “Awesome Open Source”) where you use a docker image instead of a python venv + pip install.
For Immich, official docs were fantastic!
For Nextcloud, I followed Learn Linux TV’s “How to Set Up Nextcloud on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS” (though I used Debian, not Ubuntu)
Awesome SelfHosted is a great place to start looking: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
There a million ways, and you will probably find tons of tutorials each different - Docker, Docker Compose, native install, VMWare, Kubernetes, Portainer, etc. I recommend starting with a clean machine - preferably with an attached monitor - and installing your favorite Linux distro (Ubuntu is among the easiest), getting Docker and Docker Compose running, and familiarizing yourself with these technologies.
Then you can start with a simple app like Paperless (document digitization), Vikunja (TODOs), BookStack (wiki), or PrivateBin (pastebin), getting it running and persist state over a period of time, then setting up a reverse proxy so you don’t have to use IPs all the time (with just editing your hosts file to point a URL to IP of your machine), and then it is a free world.
Of course, having the whole setup secure, independent, and easily manageable is partially eyperience and partially understanding your needs.
You will probably even find whole ready-to-deploy git repositories that are easily configurable, so you can go with that too.
I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.
There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.
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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
can I ask what is the advantage of radicale over nextcloud calendar sync?
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.
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.
What are the specs and how are you finding the performance?
It’s just an old laptop I had lying around. 8GB of ram, 256GB of storage, some old intel i5 processor (10th or 11th gen I think?). No performance hiccups, everything works well :D
I have another older laptop with a dead battery, 6th gen i3, 4GB of ram, and 128GB of storage that I haven’t touched yet, but might do so in the future.
I look at what services I use and see if I can replace any of them w/ a self-hosted solution. Rinse and repeat.
Looking for more stuff to host will just overcomplicate things. I instead try to look for ways to consolidate services down.
Home Assistant? Maybe a homepage like Heimdall or some other dashboard? Maybe Uptime Kuma to notify you when your services go down? Definately a pihole or adguard home. Biggest quality of life improvement. It’s the biggest thing my wife notices and approves of. She audibly groans in disgust when she leaves the LAN on her cellphone and sees all the ads and garbage that had previously been blocked. My pihole dashboard show 70% of the requests are blocked on my LAN. And everything works great.
If she has an Android, you can use the DNS blocker in ReThink to do something similar to pihole outside of your LAN. That’s what I use. There are others, but ReThink is pretty good and has lots of other stuff it can do as well, or just use the DNS option.
If you have a car Lubelogger is a solid maintenance tracker.
