2y ago

What are your must-have selfhosted services?

Always enjoyed scrolling though these posts, figured I'd give it a go here:

Some of mine:

Adguard Home - Add blocker
Adguard Home Sync - sync multiple adguard instances
Bookstack - documentation
BorgMatic - config driven backup
Change Detection - monitor websites for changes, prices for example.
FreshRSS - RSS reader
Home Assistant - home automation
KitchenOwl - groceries
Rclone - sync backups to remote storage
Traefik - reverse proxy
Vikunja - todo list
Wireguard Easy - VPN

116 comments

Didn't see Paperless in these comments yet. Great way to never again search for documents, bills, receipts, warranties, manuals, etc cetera ad nauseam.
- I installed paperless a couple of months ago, and then needed a document from it this week, for the first time. Standing at my front door, with a contractor waiting, I retrieved a contract in about ten seconds.
  I will never stop using this software.
- Link: Paperless-NG (Github)
- Other than the obvious of being selfhosted, how does it compare to google drive for search/recall etc
  
  I find it very useful due to its automatic assignment of various labels, categories and etc.
  These assignments mean very little work for me to keep things tidy. Icrn use labels etc for filtering so it is extremely fast to find JUST the documents I want.
  Paired with a small, fast duplex document scanner, it's incredibly convenient. Almost any kind of document I get in, just gets thrown into a scanner, and then into a box - no sorting.

Syncthing - No introduction needed. Couldn't live without it.
Healthchecks.io (you can self host this) - Dead man's switch monitoring for all my automation. Most of my automated scripts hit up a Healthchecks endpoint when they run, and if they fail to hit the endpoint on a regular schedule I get notified. Mandatory for my anxiety.
- I have a network drive that I put all my documents on. Would using syncthing have a better workflow than that?
  
  It depends on what your workflow/usecase for putting documents on the drive currently is. Syncthing is usually intended to be put on two separate devices, and then a folder on each device gets synchronized - meaning you have a folder of your documents on each device. Is there any reason not to just mount the network drive's folder and drag the documents in that way?

After looking at other's lists I think I am missing a good document server. Emby isn't the best music and photo server so I could look at improving that, but it has been good enough for those purposes that I haven't felt like going to the trouble of installing anything else.
Aster: Multiseat software for Windows allows several users to work on the same PC.
LaunchBox: Frontend for DOSBox, modern PC games and emulated console platforms.
Blue Iris: Video security and webcam software
Calibre: E-Book management and server
Emby: Server for videos, music, audio books, and photos.
Firewalla: VPN server, internet monitor and control
Foundary Virtual Tabletop: Online role-playing game server.
Grafana: Dashboard interface
Hubitat: Home automation
Hyper-V Manager: Tool that allows users to manage Hyper-V hosts and virtual machines (VMs)
InfluxDB: Real-time database server.
IotaWatt: Open WiFi electric power monitor
Microsoft SQL Server: Database Server
Octoprint: Web interface for 3D printers.
PCem: Emulator for various old 8086 through Pentium PCs.
SmartSync Pro: File sync program
SnapRaid: Backup program for disk arrays.
Stablebit DrivePool/Scanner: Disk pooling, file duplication, protection, disk surface scanner, and disk health monitoring
Steam Link: Access and play steam games remotely
- Highly recommend ditching emby for jellyfin!!
  
  I bought both Plex and Emby. I started with Plex but had some technical issues related to my machine having multiple IP addresses so I switched to Emby. I tried Jellyfin before switching to Emby but it wasn't as capable as Plex or Emby (at least at the time) and I wanted something with some commercial support behind it. I have been pretty satisfied with Emby, but do wish it would get requested features added in a much more timely manner.
- Thank you for taking the time to link everything and formatting the post

One of my favorites is Whoogle, a simple Google search proxy. It accepts search requests and forwards them to Google anonymously, then strips out the AMP links and tracking. There's even an option for it to use Tor so your IP address changes frequently.
- Whoogle vs SearXng in your experience?
  
  I used both, I ended up settling on searxng because Whoogle seemed to be unable to retain my settings. Might be something with my cookie configuration, but searxng has no problem remembering my preferences. If that is not a problem for you then they are comparable; Whoogle is pretty simple to get going and works well, searxng is slightly more complicated to set up (but not that much with docker) but has a ton more features.
  
  I looked into SearX but didn't need all the extra features it has
- All of the public instances seem to be rate limited and not return any results. Take it you don't get that issue self-hosting it?
  
  Correct. And it's such a tiny, simple Docker install you could theoretically run it locally instead of a server.

Under Proxmox, I have the following running currently:
**As LXC Containers: **
AdguardHome
Psono Password Manager
Zitadel SSO and
One I'm trying to get Pomerium installed on
As a VM
Home Assistant
The rest is all docker on the host OS which is Debian 12, this is not my complete list but the most used ones in my world:
Dozzle (great docker log viewer)
Uptime Kuma
Authentik configured to allow passkey login (Simply awesome!)
IT-Tools - https://it-tools.tech/
Homepage by Ben Phelps
WyzeCamBridge (So I can have RTSP for Home Assistant)
SterlingPDF (MultiTool for PDFS)
sshwifty - SSH within your browser - your logins are locally stored in your session only. https://github.com/nirui/sshwifty
Portainer
Vaultwarden
Protected by Authentik's SSO
Portainer
Statping
Proxmox
Wordpress (I'm evaulating this for a suitable Joplin replacement ) In short - I found that it's easier to reference a site instead of installing Joplin when I rebuild my computer.
Psono password manager
You may wonder why I am using Zitadel and Authentik, I first started with Zitadel, and moved to Authentik, but am evaluating both. They both have their positives. So far Authentik has been the most useful for me. And about the two password managers, I use Vaultwarden as it supports everything I need including Passkey support. My step daughter who is an adult is disabled so having an easier password like Psono makes it easier for her.
- How has your experience been with the wyze cameras? Do you still need to be a wyze subscriber?
  
  I'm not a Wyze subscriber and just use the cams for monitoring. The Wyze Cam Pan 3 so far has been quite amazing with low light full color pics whereas my Pan Cam 2 is just black and white in same low light.
  With the bridge, you can pipe the feed it provides to Shinobi or another DVR which reads RTSP, RTMP or HLS feeds and saves them to your storage for full time recording so you don't need the subscription. You do have to login to your Wyze account for the bridge to work though but that's fine with me.
- Any specific reason you're running Proxmox? Why not run everything in containers with one VM for HA? Why LXCs?
  
  Because, for Home Assistant, I moved it from Raspberry Pi 4 to a KVM and found it faster. I use Proxmox for that which I found to play nicer with it than just setting up a Debian Server and spinning up a KVM via QEMU on a desktop. I've been there and had issues over time. As for why LXC's they are smaller and the only ones I use are from https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ which makes them super simple to set up and run!
  
  Can't speak for OP but I can say that I switched to proxmox from just running docker and services native. Proxmox offers a lot of flexibility, you can do snapshots, build many different LXC containers very easily, to keep things separate or have better control over resource usage. Also I run mine in a 3 node cluster so I can do live migration of VMs and pretty quick migrations of LXC containers. This all allows me to run my services with little to no downtime and have redundancy.

Immich for photos (the only proper Google photos alternative) Nextcloud for storing documents and photos (read by immich). Jellyfin to replace Plex.

According to my continued survival on the planet, none.
- Not all of us are so lucky. I was hospitalized for 3 weeks until I was able to get my PiHole back up. I was nearly a goner.
- hahaha

PiHole

Jellyfin

Syncthing.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
HA	Home Assistant automation software
~	High Availability
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP	Internet Protocol
LXC	Linux Containers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
PiHole	Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
Plex	Brand of media server package
SSH	Secure Shell for remote terminal access
SSO	Single Sign-On
VPN	Virtual Private Network
nginx	Popular HTTP server

11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

[Thread #285 for this sub, first seen 17th Nov 2023, 17:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

My whole infrastructure is designed so that my homeserver is expendable.
Therefore my most important tool is Syncthing. It is decentral, which is awesome for uptime and reducing dependance on a single point of failure. My server is configured as the "introducer" node for convenience.
I try to find file-based applications, such as KeePassXC or Obsidian, whenever I can so that I can sync as much as possible with Syncthing.
Therefore there is (luckily) not much left to host and all of it is less critical:
Nextcloud AIO: calendar, contacts, RSS, Syncthing files via external storage
Webserver: Firefox search plugins (Why is this necessary, Mozilla?!), custom uBlock Origin filter list, personal website
So the worst thing that can happen when my server fails is: I need to import my OPML to a cloud provider and I loose syncing for some less important stuff and my homepage is not accessible.
Since I just rebuilt my server, I can confirm that I managed a whole week without it just fine. Thank you very much, Syncthing!

Nextcloud, after setting it up it gives me everything I love about Google and Apple's cloud services without the privacy invasion or any of the other cons. And I even find it more stable and less buggy. 10/10
- Same for me. But there is work involved in the maintenance, there are awkward transitions at times with PHP migrations. But I would not go back to Google. I have tons of storage space without having to pay the associated service fees at the cost of slower speeds.

PiHole - blocking ads Home Assistant - home automation, smart lighting & more Nginx Proxy Manager - easy reverse proxying Lemmy - here we are, on Lemmy Immich - Google photos replacement Motioneye - for putting video streams into home assistant and getting motion detection WyzeBridge - connecting my Wyze doorbells to Motioneye Doods2 - quick to set up object/person recognition for video and camera streams

Nextcloud and jellyfin

I often see wireguard and adguard or pihole mentioned. There's a service that provides a combination of wireguard and pihole in 1 docker compose file and has a web interface for wireguard clients (wgeasy) called wirehole. Been using our for 2 years or so, very happy with it.
In my opinion the most elegant solution for an ad blocking VPN.
- I think a lot of people run opnsense, pfsense or similar.
  So, run some sort of DNS blacklist on their home network, and wireguard into their home network

Currently running
speedtest tracker
uptime kuma
paperless
viewtube
airsonic
transmission
linkding
vaultwarden
nextcloud
audiobookshelf
code server
freshrss
rss bridge
nginx proxy manager
homepage
libreddit
gitea
pivpn
pihole
borg backup
time machine

Immich for image sharing and backup
Readeef for RSS reader
Blocky for dns
Jellyfin for multimedia streaming

Wow Change Detection seems like a much better alternative to curling a webpage and using grep to search for particular elements... :/
- It's easy to set up and use, I'd recommend it.

Syncthing, Gitea, jellyfin (with arr stack), audiobookshelf, Kavita.

XMPP server and a basic WebDAV server.
My own Forgejo is nice to have.

Can someone tell me the difference between Wireguard vs Wireguard Easy?
I already have Wireguard installed, so I just wanted to know if I should switch.
- Wireguard-easy is plain old wireguard with with a nice web interface for management, that's all.
  
  Thanks, I'll switch when I get my RaspPi5 for sure.

I like Keepass - Password manager housed in an encrypted database. (dont' lose your master password)

Pfsense, Bitwarden, NAS running Debian, Kubernetes cluster. I have plans to expand And add more services when I get some of my newer hardware online.

hedgedoc - formerly known as HackMD/CodiMD (mainly for teaching and lecturing)
dendrite - next gen Matrix server
coturn - Matrix signaling
WhatsApp-/Signal-Matrix Bridge
nginx
pi-hole

Home assistant is high on my todo list right after i set up my new proxmox host

Baby Buddy for tracking my kid's... Everything.
- +1!!
  Before the baby arrived I wondered how this could be useful, now that the baby is here this is indispensable. So glad I have this.
  
  I’ve been playing with this and am wondering if you know how to log specific medicine like Tylenol and stuff like that.

I hardly ever see people talking about Pocketbase in threads like these, but as a dev I love it
- Pocketbase is amazing.
  
  For everyone else:
  Realtime database
  Authentication
  File storage
  Admin dashboard
- What do you use it for and why do you like it over other databases
- You don't hear a lot of talk because it's SQLite with a thin layer added on top (an SDK and some Oauth modules). You can achieve the same in 5 minutes with SQLite and a few NPM modules.

I can't live without my Nextcloud + Email server. Having all my personal files, contacts, email, calendar, and other personal information immediately accessible synced and backed up with a single app on any device or platform I want to use, is a dream come true, and I get to do it without any Big Tech, avoiding their lock-in and privacy invasion and without any fees or limits beyond my own hardware.
OpenVPN is how I can access it from anywhere in the world, so that gets an honorable mention too.

Vaultwarden Jellyfin Sonarr Radarr Jacket

Syncthing
FreshRSS
Wireguard
Transmission + WebUI
Samba4 (files and WebDav for Joplin and some others)
FileBrowser

For me it's gotta be Portainer, Vaultwarden, and Tailscale. Everything else (FreshRSS, Heimdall, Paperless) is just cream.
- +1 for Tailscale. It's a vital piece of the system for me now.
  
  What makes it so useful? Is it just remote access if you're away from your pc, or what do you use it for?

My personal setup:
Nextcloud - For files, backup, contacts and calendar
Vaultwarden - Password Safe
Paperless - Document management, combined with a compatible scanner a true blessing (with scan to SMB)
I have been playing with some other tools, but these are the most important for me.
- (with scan to SMB)
  So the scanner saves the file in SMB-share(s), then Paperless(-xng) will automatically process it?
  Maybe Paperless, with an LLM API integration to chat with the documents, using the power of referring to and verifying against Paperless' concrete results, would be somehow useful.
  Edit: Oh, this is already being discussed on their GitHub. Of course it is!
  
  You are right with the first part. It only takes three clicks to scan a doc and have it available.
  As for me, I'm not interest in sending my documents to open AI. But it would definitely offer some nice functions.

My current list is: AdGuardHome, Bazaar, Change Detection, CloudTube, Excaldraw, Filesbrowser, Ghost, Golink (Tailscale), IT Tools, Libreddit, Lidarr, Memos, mStream, Nginx Proxy Manager, OliveTin, OpenBooks, Overseerr, PairDrop, Pigallery, Pingvin Share, Plex, Prowlarr, qBittorrent, Radarr, Sonarr, Statping, Stirling PDF, Syncthing, Tautulli, Unmanic, Whoogle, WikiJS, YoutubeDL-Material
- This one? https://github.com/CorentinTh/it-tools
  
  Yes, that's the one. Sorry I didn't include links

Vaultwarden AdGuardHome + Sync Jellyfin + FinAmp + Supersonic Linkding + Linkding Injector LLDAP Calibre-web + Kobo

Sandstorm

MythTV for the AV ... Volumio too, but, not upgrading that to v3.
Not seen radicale mentioned here...
I was an early adopter of OwnCloud and then switched to Nextcloud and, well, just gave up with it... no-one edits documents on it, we don't look at photos on it, but we did use a shared calendar... so I ditched that, installed radicale and been much happier (ie less admin time, more life time)
Also running syncthing from our phones to a home built NAS and a tablet in the kitchen as the NextCloud photo upload was (still is?) broken.
I run Arch btw
Home Assistant of course... MotionEye in a Pi Zero...
And it's all behind a pfSense box with DNS and GeoIP blockers installed.
Oh, and EmonCMS for my SolarPV.
- I run Arch btw
  I don't know if you were trying to be funny but that got a smirk out of me.
- +1 mythtv. It distributes OTA TV to kodi all over the house.
- I run Radicale, got all my calendars, contacts, tasks/reminders and even notes on it. It's a great CalDAV & CardDAV server. Lightweight too, and backup is super simple since each thing is a plain text file. Been using it with DAVx5 on the phone and it works perfectly.
  
  What do you use on your phone for Tasks?
  OpenTasks is great, but hasn't had an update in 3 years, but jtx Board is unclear and massive overkill for me

By Darwin I had not heard of wg-easy before. That is indeed easier than my setup. Thank you.

Firefly III - Finance Manager
Strongwan - IPsec VPN
Mealie - Recipe Manager
Samba - Network Drive
ProjectSend - Mediafire kind of upload thing
Vaultwarden - Password Manager
Nginx - Reversed Proxy
Pihole - DNS Adblocker
Portainer - Docker Interface
Vikunja - TODO Notes
Anki, Joplin, Obsidian Sync Server - Syncing of your notetaking solution of choice
Homeassistant - Smart Home Frontend
Immich - Google Photos Replacement

Home Assistant - Home automation and Smart home
Nextcloud - cloud, rss, tasks, kanban, online office suite, file sharing
Hedgedoc - markdown notes with easy publication
adguard - ad blocking software
Wallabag - Mozilla Pocket alternative
Jellyfin - multimedia server

A bunch of random thought... If anyone has any brief tips...
I'm going to dive into borgmatic soon.
Is it possible to back up PCs on the same network?
I think I'm looking to do 2 things... Have my main PC synced to a backup drive. Nightly? So I can DD to a new drive if I mess some up on my PC. I'd like to be able to do this with my omv server too.
The other is just backing up nas storage and docker.
Borg seemed like a good option for some of that but I'm not sure about the usable syncing of a full system.
Also wireguard... Right now I use a VPN subscription and run apps through gluetun... Instead of using my vpns meshnet I use tailscale for outside the home access. So I guess my question is, could I set up wireguard and use that instead of tailscale? My main reason is to find a way other family could utilize the nas and gluetun VPN connection.
There's so much planning that goes into this stuff. Finding the right apps and then the workflow... 🥴
In the end I want to host cloud storage and photo sharing for family, as well as maybe let them stream my media. Have the cloud storage, and my personal storage backed up. And possible let family utilize my subscription VPN if possible.
- Borg is great for backups.
  To recover a running system you would normally use snapshots but backups. You want something like Timeshift, which integrates with the boot system and lets you boot into a previous snapshot if you mess up your install. You can also use a specialized filesystem like btrfs which has a built-in, more efficient method of doing snapshots.
- You can sync easily to another device on the same network via ssh for example. You can also call a script automatically after the backup has been created and do your custom stuff in there.
  I'm really liking borgmatic myself as a wrapper for Borg.
  EDIT: I don't have experience doing full OS backups. I only make backups of specific directories.

tailscale: mesh vpn
jellyfin: media server
flame: home page
streamrip: easy way to download music to the server
cockpit: gui for general management of the server

piped and libreddit, also i'd like to host my own simplex server
- libreddit is dead though...
  
  Is libreddit dead if you self host and don't make enough requests to end up rate limited?
  
  works still fine, especially self-hosted

Last time I checked, I had >30 containers running. 🙆
- Do you like any of them more than others?
  
  I respect all of them equally

116 comments