What can the 'average Joe' start hosting, that will change their life?
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!
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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!
https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
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
Thanks for the insight!
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.
yeah, and it will order them in a configurable manner, based on dates, tags, people, etc. and as things change in the meta-data of the document, it moves/renames the file to suit.
And if you try paperless and don’t like it, docspell is another great option.
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
I also am creating engagement.
I also am creating engagement.
i thoguht you may be a bot as there are 20-odd replies the same, but my guess is you are using an app which is a bit dicky.
can you delete all the repeats?
Tried, app wasn't letting me delete either... Funny that it was on this specific post.
How is your work flow from scanning to paperless? Does it support some kind of upload folder?
Yeah paperless supports an upload folder. My scanner has an ability to scan to a network drive, so I scan things onto a shared drive on my homelab box, paperless consumes the scanned PDF and places it into the paperless "inbox".
Cool, that's really easy. I'll have to bring that up with my gf. She's basically hoarding printouts and stuff (she's a teacher) and this might help her in getting it a bit more organized
i dont have a scanner, but do use the email function to get my work payslips.
Yep, supports upload folder, normal upload in the application and also automatically importing from email based on folder/label
i use the app, it is essentially a photo which is resized/shaped to be a rectangle.
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!
definitely try it out. You can auto-ingest from the scanner folder and it will do all the rest of the sorting for you. I go in every few weeks/months and look at the recent documents to sort and fix up any meta-data/sorting.
Thanks. I've set it up and imported all my existing scans. Works great.
awesome. i think that the initial install "just works", then you can start to tweak it. just make sure you mount actual directories, not docker volumes, otherwise you cannto see the files on the disk.
Thanks for the suggestion! I tried to do that and have the files reside on a mount (on my NAS) but that didn't work, resulted in a "chmod" error. So, instead I've created a shell script that runs every night and creates a backup & copies the resulting zip file to my NAS :)
By the way, when using docker volumes, you can see the actual files as well. In my case (RPI4) they are located here: /var/lib/docker/volumes/paperless_media/_data/documents
good to know! thanks
With the right permissions you can get to them. ( i needed root, well started with root)
Without even opening I had this in mind.
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.
well, there are a few things:
so, whilst a folder structure would work. this is SOOO much easier, and provides much more functionality as it is not just storage. it also has WAF!
That was a really clear explanation, thanks. Decent remote scanning would be nice. I guess I just have to wrap my head around tags for some of the niceties to make sense, though I guess i'd be no worse off if I just used folders if that's an option as well.
you're welcome.
I tend to use document types more than tags now. note that there are a number of meta-data fields:
i started with tag, but now mostly use a combination of the doc date, type and correspondent. Then use the search bar for specific documents.
Yo this shit is awesome. Going to be setting this up asap.
Saved for futures reference
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 ;)
Depends on your source and connection but I managed to recover 8tb of movies in a couple weeks.
I have a duplicate server off site that I back it up to
Same here, 192tb, but sonarr, radarr, plex, and the source that shall not be named (I respect the 2 rules).
It's not about outlay, I can watch what I want, when I want, how I want, without anyone tracking, even wrote my own video player interface in python so the mouse buttons handle all the settings.
Completely ruins you for normal media :/
Is it useful without piracy though? It would still be expensive to buy all that media? And usually you can’t even download movies etc that you buy online. Am I missing something?
Quite a bit of what I have on my Jellyfin server is ripped from DVDs and Blu-Rays that I already had.
Makes sense. I didn’t think of copying from disks
Other than Disney stuff, you can't really guarantee on your kids favorite show or movie always being available on a streaming service you're already paying for. Jellyfin has been great for those moments. Used to use Plex, and it's very good software, but I got tired of the non-free aspects. Made me feel like I was subscribing to one more streaming service.
But also kind of with Disney stuff, too
Never heard of tailscale, checking it!
Probably an ignorant question but the content you use is pirated right? Should I wonder about legal issues since I would keep it at home and connected to Internet? Protected of course I just don't see too deep into the issue
If you don't explicitly set a DNS to allow access from outside the local network, all your stuff is private and confined within your local network. As it is with all, let's say, wifi stuff that goes on in your home.
Edit. What @notorious said
I think you mean explicitly open the port on your router, but even then that’s not true. Plex by default will proxy your traffic so that even closed off servers can be reached. It is pretty easy to disable remote access in the server settings though.
Home Assistant. It's a rabbit hole, but it's great. I've got motion enabled lights, thermostats for "dumb" heaters, and I track device usage (tablet, xbox) of my kids.
And it's so nice having zero dependence on the cloud. If the internet drops out, everything still works, including the mobile app.
Not necessarily, I have devices that are cloud dependent. Locally in NZ there aren't a lot of options, all smart plugs are cloud dependent. Also things like weather integrations will stop working.
It's up to you to make it cloudless, but Home Assistant is the only solution I know of out there that even allows this possibility. I refuse to use anything in my home that requires a third party app or cloud connection (aside from initial pairing so I can flash it with ESPHome or some other local-only firmware). Admittedly it complicates things, but the payoff is so worth it.
I use Home Assistant as well, but Apple HomeKit (and the new Matter protocol) can also be cloudless I think.
Yup, HomeKit can 100% work without internet. It’s a requirement of being HomeKit certified. I block internet access to all my HomeKit devices and they work just fine.
Yeah you are right, think all other alternatives require the cloud. I've just started with HA so I'm still pretty new to it. I've found some good Zigbee plugs on Aliexpress that pair well with ZHA. Over time I can replace the un-flashable cloud based smart plugs from TP Link and Brilliant.
There should be plenty of zigbee stuff in the market, right? Ikea and Phillips stuff are mostly zigbee and can work with homeassistant + zigbee dongle (zha). Some tuya switch and smart plugs are zigbee too and can pair directly to homeassistant + zha without using a cloud account.
Locally in NZ we only have Hue which is very expensive. Aliexpress has options but is a bit hit and miss quality.
If you can buy stuff from aliexpress, then look for tuya devices with explicit zigbee support as they usually can work with ZHA. Avoid tuya wifi devices if you can.
Theres plenty of Tasmota based plugs out there. Cloudfree.shop would probably ship to you.
Unfortunately not. I mostly get my stuff from Aliexpress; I've found some good Zigbee plugs there.
New Zealand is awesome, but not if you want to have many online shopping options :)
Look for z-wave or zigbee plugs. You'll need to buy a hub, but unless NZ has banned the protocol, it should get you smart switches, outlets, thermostats and more.
Yeah, I've recently bought a HA SkyConnect & some plugs from AliExpress and they work well. Whenever I'll be in Australia I'll get some Ikea stuff too. Locally the only Zigbee option is Hue which I find too expensive.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
I’ll second this, it’s a great thing to have around and there is always something to tinker this. It’s basically a new hobby though if you like automation and monitoring things so budget your time and money accordingly haha.
Self hosting nothing changed my life.
So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅
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.
Vaultwarden is super easy. I've not had a single problem with it and I've been running it for a couple years.
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!
yeah, password manager for me. love it. I am looking at using the home assistant addon to manage it now, it may make life a little easier.
This was going to be my suggestion!
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.
I feel like this one needs to be higher up. It so immediately and instantly changes your browsing experience (especially on a phone), that I VPN into my own home network when I’m out just to stay on the PiHole.
Plus, when you get further along in your selfhosting journey you can use the custom DNS to re-route domain names so you never need to leave your network to use your own services.
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.
For me it's 100% Nextcloud. It was a pain to get working at first (and I'm dreading the day it breaks, if that happens). But it is so much more than just a self-hosted Dropbox solution:
My experience has been that Nextcloud can do 1000 different things, and it sucks at all of them.
Ive run NC in one way or another for years now, and switching to a docker-compose stack was an absolute gamechanger for upgrades and break fix ease.
Nextcloud is the Wordpress of cloud storage. You can customize it to do literally everything. You can even write your own plugin if necessary. But unlike Wordpress, the default setup is quite locked down (you can't just drop php files somewhere and have it accessible to reduce security risk) and you'll actually have to follow certain formats and standards when writing a plugin, unlike the free-for-all every-man-for-himself nature of wordpress plugin development.
I had a lot of trouble setting up nextcloud in the past but if you go with the Docker method, it's really easy.
I did end up using the docker, probably circa 2019, but I recall trouble with the nginx config as well as some of the required docker networking.
Absolutely this. Nextcloud brings so much stuff to the table, it's just awesome.
Yes, Nextcloud. It's not perfect, but it has made my life easier for the last few years
It's a lot of pain to set up, but Nextcloud with OnlyOffice is just great for editing documents collaboratively and in realtime on the web. Actually one of the things that works better than O365's web editors.
Some of my notes here if anyone wants them
The problem with OnlyOffice is that it doesn't allow for editing from Android, because then you'll have to pay, which is why I switched to Collabora Office.
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Yeah, I've also found that issue a while ago. Though I don't use the editor on Android anyways, so not an issue for me.
I had trouble setting up Collabora Office, but maybe I should revisit that.
Before you set up Collabora, you should know that the rendering is done server-side and not client-side. This provides really good synchronization, as the clients will receive the changes simultaneously, but it also results into slower performance, because the server has to do the rendering, instead of the clients.
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Thanks!
It's mostly a recolored version of the Learn2 theme for Grav plus various plugins and small customizations.
Carnet to replace google keep notes
Is that a nextcloud plugin?
It's a nextcloud app: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/carnet
and then there's an android app for your phone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spisoft.quicknote
If you wanna replace google docs the onlyoffice nextcloud integration is excellent
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.
Swinger parties?
FreshRSS, news and websites fetched your way. You can even create feeds for websites that don't provide one
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.
Actual Budget I use to track my finance.
Duplicacy for backups to OneDrive and Backblaze
Photoprism as Google replacement
An RSS reader (I use Miniflux), ended up being extremely useful
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.
Hosting a wedding has a pretty good chance to be life changing
Exactly a couple of things that we (me and the wife) use really often:
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 was thinking about doing this but you can be a suspect on a criminal case if Tor is relaying ilegall activities.
Therefore the "life changing" aspect of it
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.
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?
probably, docker is docker, should work independently of the host OS
Thanks, figured as much. My main issue is Docker is annoying on Windows and trying to give it sufficient storage and configuring that with Docker has always been something I just never figure out.
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.
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.
That makes sense thanks. I did have trouble figuring out where to start with ansible, do you have any advice about that?
You're welcome!
I'm still an ansible newbie myself. I first heard about it in this video; https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7p9-m4cimg&pp=ygURV29sZmdhbmcgYW5zaWJsZSA%3D
Then I just figured out by googling and reading the docs / stack exchange.
I started by doing something simple, e.g. write an ansible playbook to update a raspberry pi on my network. Then went from there to launch a small VPS, googling each step that I'd normally do to configure a server, and run them all one after the other on ansible.
I love Wolfgang. His videos are so high quality
For me it’s a HomeAssistant instance. Great product that has some very tangible use cases that can benefit ones household in terms of being able to implement nice automations etc, and also a great hub in that it supports such a broad range of products and services. As an Apple user in particular its one of the great ways to get non HomeKit certified devices working with Siri/Homekit on my other Apple products.
It also makes installing addons a breeze including other products people have mentioned here such as AdGuard Home (as a PiHole alternative) and the like.
A few years ago I’d say it wasn’t for the average Joe, but I think the product has really matured and is much simpler than it used to be. There’s a strong community out there too.
For multimedia I’d say Plex personally, but Jellyfin would be another option. Good way to manage personal media libraries.
Parties.
Your own nextcloud instance. Then move everything that is saved at Google over to your own server.
Calenders, Filesync, Contacts sync with android works really nice.
Knowing my data is stored only on my own devices and google doesn't know more about me than I do is a nice feeling.
After what happened to imgur and gfycat, definitely their own image hosting service.
Home Assistant is nice! Have it integrated with some smart lights and smart plugs. Makes it easy to monitor and control everything locally.
We have it set up in our room so that one widget controls the lights, one controls the fans, one controls the monitors, then there's a master button that we use to turn off everything that doesn't need to be always on whenever we leave the room.
Want to play with some fancier stuff with it too, but that alone is incredibly convenient.
DNS. It's always DNS
for better or worse it is, (though I don't recommend newcomers to boot up a bind server to manage their dns, pihole is probally the best starting point)
Indeed,
dnsmasqwould be much easier to handle than BIND OOTB. I have personally not come across a reason to use BIND for myself, and struggle to see its appeal out of the enterprise/enterprise-like labs, but I don't really know much about homelabbing eitherIn my (our) case we use bind to run an authoritative resolver for our domain (I am sysadmin for a uni computer society, we have our own (physical) servers)
Well, that is an enterprise-like environment. I'm curious though, why BIND over other DNS implementations? Unless you have very specific requirements I'm sure other DNS solutions would scale too
Bind is well established, got plenty of documentation, is what the previous iteration of the resolver used and on top of all that it works really well with NixOS
A NAS or Nextcloud or some other way of having files available remotely.
Having a big box with a lot of storage that you can put things on from anywhere is so incredibly useful.
If you spend some time learning how docker/podman works you'll be able to host practically anything!
I have a PiHole, my own EdgeRouter that is behind the Verizon router, a UPS, a wired switch, a SiliconDust HD HomeRun to convert my cable to a stream, my Hue controller, my Camera DVR, and a Pi4 hosting network storage.
It all fits neatly in a 6U closet rack. I use the EdgeRouter to host a VPN I can connect into to manage things for the house, and also use it to dial out to a VPN, so I can connect the TVs in the house to a VPN abroad.
I also have a Smart Garden powered by a raspberry pi, connected to a rain barrel, a water pump, some solenoids, and some moisture sensors.
I’d recommend you to look up *arr stack and Jellyfin. Good start is Trash guides. It will guide you step by step on how to properly set it up. It can completely replace Netflix and all other streaming services and its all free.
I started with Plex, but I would say it wasn't until I spun up Nextcloud and got it running that I really would say my life changed. My entire family now has Nextcloud accounts, a family calendar, instant upload of pictures from my phone, all my recipes, and I even have OnlyOffice document server running for editing documents in Nextcloud.
Did you do anything special to get onlyoffice working? I’ve tried numerous times to add OO to my nextcloud, and it’s never worked for me. It’s the one thing I’m missing that would let me move my wife off of google.
The one that was lifechanging for me is audiobookshelf. I LOVE having full ownership and control over all of my audiobooks, and the ability to enjoy them on any device I choose.
We recently set up a magic mirror (showing public transport connections/time/calendar/weather information) on a raspberry pi 3b. But it involved some more fiddling with electronics and software.
(Maybe an alternative would also be possible using small oled (128x64 pixel) screens)
Would be my suggestion if you are up for a challenge =)
We also used to host our own nextcloud, but decided to move it to hetzner as the pricing was unbeatable..
Else a pihole would also have been my suggestion. Maybe a Kodi mediacenter is also worth looking into.
For me nextcloud was the biggest gamechanger. A raspberry pi and a SSD and suddenly I didn't have to store anything at Google drive anymore. And it's really beginner friendly, especially when using NextcloudPi
Let me throw in Paperless NGX, https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
A CCTV system. That directly affects the safety of yourlifee
These are some things I recommend. Vault warden. (paswoord manager). Jellyfin. (a great web based media player).. Portainer
Not exactly a "life changing experience", but using blocky instead of pihole or adguard. It's basically "the same thing" but with way more customization features -- and the "cherry on top" of setting it as user nobody instead of root or your current one.
PhotoPrism is a really big one for me. You will need some computing power and storage, but being able to run your own Google Photos is amazing. Including AI features like object and face detection (if you want).
https://www.photoprism.app/
Vaultwarden!!! There's lots of nice things that may or may not be good for you depending on your needs. But vaultwarden is straight up essential.
Lemmy is pretty fun to host. Doubly so if you host a private instance with low latency; you'd basically be defederation proof.
SearxNG for search: https://docs.searxng.org/
You can try it using a public instance if you like, but since installing it is easy and painless, just go for it.
syncthing works on every device and substitutes for cloud storage services. pictures taken with a phone end up quickly in the shared folder on my desktop. etc.
Home Assistant.
Trillium notes and Bitwarden.
The note is packed with features and it can build maps from your tags aromatically. It helped me easily recall things
Bitwarden, because password need to be secured.
Anyone have a solid how-to for the layman to host their own lemmy instance? I heard it improves browsing a lot.
I'm hosting syncthing on my server to sync obsidian notes between my pc and phone, even when one of the devices is offline. I find it very useful. Also, nextcloud, jellyfin, qbittorrent, monero node and netdata for monitoring my server
My vote is for Jellyfin. It is fully opensource.
Plex has better client support though. Have you seen the Xbox app?
Tdarr for transcoding too.
I’ve been using Emby for a few years after Plex just became worse and worse, relying on cloud logins and being unreliable, pushing their own junk content above my library etc. Emby reminds me of what plex used to be, it’s amazing!
Joplin.
You don't strictly have to self host it but it's gotten pretty good with a WYSIWYG editor now and everything.
Calibre docker stack; Calibre Guacamole instance, CalibreWeb, Openbooks set to save to the Calibre autoimport folder, and FBreader hooked to the OPDS endpoint for calibre. Its like having an Amazon Books ecosystem of my own.
ActualBudget. If you don't already budget, ActualBudget is a remarkably nice budgeting tool that will change your financial life for the better. actualbudget.com/
For me, it was a wiki/knowledge base - I've had dozens over the years as I've tried to find the 'right' one, but I'm currently a fan of @[email protected]. My brain's not always the most reliable, and so my wiki becomes my 'external brain'. A lot of people are using things like Obsidian/Notion/etc in the same way.
I'm using obsidian at the moment, but bookstack looks pretty nice. I'll have to look at that more and see if it would be a good replacement. Can I ask what made bookstack your current driver?
The shelves->books->pages metaphor sort of works for me. It lets me categorise my thoughts in a way that works for me. The lead dev is also really communicative, and it's been really easy to deploy and run. I've been meaning to try and find some time to contribute some hacks to it.
Ideally, I'd love a way to make Bookstack and Obsidian work together...
Ah yeah that makes sense. That organization would be slick, since obsidian feels like it's all over the place unless you micromanage backlinks. I'll look some more into it once I wrap up with Homepage. Another post got me started on that lol
The ability to insert flow charts on the go with the draw.io integration built in is amazing for technical documentation.
That's such a good idea. I may have to look into this. Thank you
I might decide to try this for bookmarks. My current problem is I collect all info in various bookmarks. Like open source tools > media/office/bookmarks , royaltyfree > music/pictures/movies, cloud services > storage/VPS/dedicated, temp shares > files/images/video etc etc etc
It ends up with a lot of duplicates because some things fit into multiple categories, I'm at over 3k bookmarks now.
I am curious if it might work well to use bookstack for that instead. Thank you for the idea.
May I suggest you benotes for that?
Really happy with it, hast folders, subfolders, tags and search. Still on development, but I like it enough to recommend it every time someone looks for a way to sort their bookmarks
Thanks! I actually did briefly try it as a Keep notes replacement, but decided against it purely because the checklist function does not actually remove the item from the list so it doesn't work as a shopping list, so the wife would never use it!
I did not consider the potential of using it to store bookmarks. I'll give it another look. Thanks!
Also interested, after all the *arr apps I would say:
Also a neat web tool for messing with data there is cyberchef.
Thanks to this post I realized there is really only one or two services I really use or need haha (ZNC and the other one is a web tool for a popular ttrpg ->pm).
All of this and more is inside docker containers so if you don't know that I would highly recommend it.
Since no one else has mentioned it, I’ll give a shout out to documentation engine Outline, which allows for self-hosting. Definitely on the trickier side to set up (requires three auxiliary services to be configured) but creates great looking docs that share easily, allows for collaboration and is super fast.
So, if you don't know yet what you're doing, I wouldn't host anything critical yet, but I'm using:
https://yunohost.org/
And so far, very few troubles. It's a layer on top of Debian to ease self-hosting. Comes by default with email and XMPP server. You can add Nextcloud and many other services as you wish.
TandoorRecipes is a great little recipe-hosting service, and it's available as an app on Unraid. No more saving recipes in my notes app, I actually have nicely-formatted ingredient lists and instructions.
I've recently also discovered Mealie.io which looks amazing, but I'm still in the setup phase of my first self-hosting solution so I can't recommend from personal experience.
I'll second Tandoor. It's been so easy to use and import recipes that my 70 year old mother figured it out without help.
Nextcloud has a recipe app as well, and an Android app as well. Haven't used it much but I thought that it worked pretty well for scraping internet recipes.
I'll second Tandoor. It's been so easy to use and import recipes that my 70 year old mother figured it out without help.
Plex with the ARR apps have changed my life and save me and my family about 1k per year.
Whats a good way for me to take the dive into self hosting without getting myself in trouble security wise? I would love something that is basic to build off of as I experiment with it to teach myself the more advanced stuff.
If you are into RPGs Foundry VTT is a great replacement for roll 20 or any of the other virtual tabletops.
https://snikket.org/
Is very nice as a personal messenger (WhatsApp replacement) for friends and family. It uses XMPP.
How does it differ from Matrix?
IIRC they're just different protocols. Snickett is XMPP, while something like Synapse is Matrix. XMPP is older than Matrix as a protocol, and from what I've heard is it's far lighter on resources than Matrix, at least Synapse. Looked into XMPP when I was researching how I was going to set up my private messaging and it seemed nice, but lack of good iOS clients at the time made it a non-starter as my family and friends are mixed between iOS and Android. Don't know if the client situation has changed however.
Yes there are good iOS clients now. Snikket has an official one included and there is also https://monal-im.org/ which works well with other XMPP servers.
Oh that's good to hear. I'll most likely look into it again then, since client support was what was really holding me back. Do you have an XMPP server deployed? If so, what did you end up going with?
I run a relatively big XMPP server. For that Ejabberd is better. But in general I would recommend Snikket or Prosody (on which Snikket is based) for self-hosting. But not a huge difference overall.
Great to know. Thanks! I'm looking into them now.
thanks
Sure thing. But it seems my position on iOS client support is out of date. poVoq said that there's a couple decent options for XMPP clients now for iOS.
it uses XMPP instead
@jaackf
SyncThing. It's the best sort of selfhosted program. You set it up once and then never think about it because it just keeps quietly doing what you wanted.
Wikis can be great if you've got a few folks that need to coordinate information.
An RSS reader/aggregator.
@selfhosted
Hi there! The links in your response are not clickable for Lemmy users, here are the clickable versions: ![email protected]
It depends on what you use on your daily basis. There's a lot of stuff, but what do you use normally? Are you a Netflix user? More of an audible guy? Evernote/notion? Maybe we can then recommend something that's useful for you
You can self host a local chatgpt like ai known as a local large language model. Searx and Searxbg are great customizable meta search engines that you can customize to scrape whatever you want
Nextcloud-snap is surprisingly easy to setup.
snap install nextcloudis all you need to have a functioning setup. Then run a second command to setup HTTPS and you're good to go :DDoes a pihole setup not slow down your connectivity? Been looking into it but I'm very much a novice with my raspberry pi. I do want to use it for something cool other than just sitting around.
And my question is only deepened by the fact that I have a synology box as well. I could use pihole on that instead of my raspberry pi, right?
n8n changed my life but job specific
i have tried N8N, but still prefer node-red. any reason why N8N?
N8n isnt really mich like NR, its more of just a way to paste together cloud services. Nodered is streets ahead in functionality.
I haven’t tried node-red :D
Portainer and a decent docker lab box. I use a template list from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xneo1/portainer_templates/master/Template/template.json as a base kit, but beyond that creating a pile of compose scripts and having the ability to put up and down services from a fairly simple GUI just to test them out is amazing. It's the simplest way I've found to just try an app, and either keep or toss it with minimal cleanup and reset of a box.
How do i save this for later
a tor exit node :P /s
For someone completely new to self-hosting things, what is a good entry hardware setup look like? Or am I just keeping my daily PC on all the time?
Old PC that can be on all the time.
If you dont have one and want dedicated hardware, I would recommend a used server, or something you can whitebox (like using as asrock rack mobo that takes a desktop ryzen but supports ecc memory)
Put proxmox on as the host OS, two ssd's in raid 1 is good for a boot drive / VM storage drive. Raid 10 if you want real high performance, but probably unneeded.
Look for a case that has a SAS backplane, and then connect the backplane to a HBA card. Pass this card through to freenas for storage shares and stuff.
I recommend not virtualizing your router. So, if you want togoet away from Soho gear, either flash a Soho router with openWRT, or build a separate box for pfsense or opnsense. If you go that route, you will need a separate switch / access point. Unifi gear has a good balance of features and affordability, and can all be managed from a single ui (let's say you have 3 switches and 2 access points... You dont need to go to 5 web UI's, its all in one spot - and you can self host the web ui in proxmox)
An old PC uses significantly more power than e.g. a RPI or a NUC. Something to keep in mind.
I've never self hosted, started maybe two years ago. First I've started with a Raspberry Pi 3, but quickly decided that 1GB of ram, and limited power was not enough for my needs. I've got myself a Dell OptiPlex SFF (used), it came with 16GBs of ram, then I've added a 4TB HDD. I'd say, this is an "entry" piece of hardware, as it's cheap and sips power (around 15-20W at idle). If you don't need the disk space or much power, go with a micro (whichever manufacturer you chose, HP, Dell, IBM), they're cute little boxes that make a RasPi seem both underpowered and overpriced (for a used one anyway).
Anything that can run programs and stay on all day. Raspberry Pi's, or their alternatives work great. Any old computer or laptop you have would work too. Or you can get a used PC, or build a new one if you have money to waste.
Get one of them mini PCs that they attach to the backs of monitors at office desks or receptions or whatever. Something like a Lenovo m720q for reference, though there many other similar products from other companies. They can be had for pretty cheap on the used market where they are abundantly available, they're very power efficient (obviously not as efficient as a pi but still pretty damn good), and they're surprisingly powerful for how small they are. I'd actually recommend a machine like that over a raspberry pi. Pis are great when you want the smallest and most low power machine you can get, but at the end of the day it's an ARM based machine with very limited IO. A regular ol' x64 machine with bog standard sata and m.2 ports all inside a neat enclosure is also great.
Most of these would run just fine on a Raspberry Pi.
@republicofRAD @jaackf You can leave your own PC on, you can buy new hardware, or you can rent a server. Any of the above is a valid way to run your own services.
A low-end VPS (virtual private server) costs around $5 a month and can run plenty of stuff as long as it's not particularly heavy (no video hosting). Running a website on a VPS is a very common first entry to self-hosting, especially if you don't have stable internet at home.
But is VPS by definition not self hosting?
You can get yourself a 1L pc from Dell, Lenovo, or HP 8th gen or newer for pretty cheap. Great little work horses. You can find Dell Optiplexes on any second hand sites in your area really cheap too.
But in all reality, the old machine you already have is the best solution. If you got an old computer from an upgrade years ago, that's great to play on
Old laptop. Has a battery backup, is likely x86, you can always get easy local shell access, and they're really cheap. You can get an old Dell laptop online for next to nothing if you don't already have something lying around. But you or someone you know probably do have one lying around.
7th or 8th gen NUC with as much ram as you can stuff in it.
-Adguard Home -HomeAssistant
So many good comments and stuff to try out. Gonna safe this for later and research a bit more!
Plex
A catch-all email server. I have a limitless amount of mail addresses going to me and my wife's mailboxes. When an address gets leaked or start receiving spam I immediately know what company is to blame.
Outline for your own VPN. You can even try it for free in tandem with Google cloud
Hi Average Joe 👋 just start with a simple PiHole installation. From here on, the options are endless
Matrix so you can chat privately
I'll throw in: Archiveteam Warrior. I leave it running on a VPS somewhere. When a website says they're shutting down, or going private or something, they step in and write code to archive the website (usually via sending it to archive.org).
What about hosting a web server, would it not be quite a change too?
Meth labs. That will definitely change anyone's life.