this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
165 points (97.7% liked)

Selfhosted

49406 readers
939 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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!

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] DrunkAnRoot@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Mozhi its searxng of translators

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 1 points 35 minutes ago

I've got LibreTranslate installed so don't need another translator, but Mozhi seems pretty cool though :D

[–] themakara@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)
  • Paperless if you want to keep your digital documents organized.
  • Jellyfin/Navidrome for music streaming if you have a collection.
  • AudiobookShelf for streaming & tracking progress of audoobooks if you have a collection.
  • Kitchenowl for organizing your household (expenses, shopping lists, recipes, planning meals)
  • FreshRSS for RSS-Feeds (News, Blogs etc)
  • LinkDing for Bookmark Management
  • Game-Servers (like Minecraft or others)

EDIT:Added Linkding & GameServers

[–] TurboLag@lemmings.world 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Are you using Kitchenowl for storing recipes? If so, what's your experience with it?

I've tried Tandoor, the common suggestion for recipe management, but I've found it too clunky to add recipes to. I like the concept, but it would take a long time to move all my recipes into the specific format they use, and the web UI does not make things easier.

[–] Provolone@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago

Worth checking out Mealie, too. Can't say how it compares to Tandoor or Kitchenowl but I've been happy with Mealie for years now.

[–] themakara@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

My experience with the function is limited, but I think it's decent. Markdown support, import from websites etc. If you add the items to the recipe with their amounts and then write them out in the text it automatically give you the amount you need based on the portions specified.

On app.kitchenowl.org you can create a demo-user and household. Within that, you can try the recipe function. Sign up requires a mail-address, but it does not need to be a valid one.

[–] kristoff 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I run a small setup on a seperate server segment (2nd router behind my main router) so it is on the internet. I run nextcloud, an dendrite and conduit instance (matrix chat-server servers), a mastodon and go-to-social instance (fediverse), bitwarden (password manager), and others.

If there is a service that you do not want to be publically accessable by everybody but you do want to access from everywhere on the internet yourself, check out client-side TLS (https) certificates. The server does is accessable from the internet put only people who have a TLS certificate on their client signed by you can access it. For services that do not require incoming connections from other machines (e.g. nextcloud, bitwarden, ... but no federated services like matrix-chat or the fediverse) that is a very good option to protect your servers.

[–] DownByLaw@sh.itjust.works 50 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] toketin@feddit.it 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Firefly III in order to track your expenses

[–] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 3 points 20 hours ago

In my experience, firefly is not aimed at household or personal finance. It is very obviously made by and for accountants.

Actual Budget is much more approachable for the normal home user, and very similar to the successful YNAB.

[–] Provolone@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Actual Budget if you're more into envelope budgeting. I came from YNAB and could not get the same workflow out of Firefly as I could YNAB. Actual Budget does provide that.

I do think setting up HTTPS is required for Actual so if you don't have that yet, then Firefly is the way to go.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] excess0680@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

You may or may not be a developer, but I would like to vote for Gitea/Forgejo. Should you ever get a grasp of git, a git forge is great for keeping code and even plain text documents recorded. It’s my favorite self-hosted service by far.

It can even operate as an OIDC server, so you can create a single login for all your services (that support OIDC).

I’ll also recommend Grist, an alternative to Google Sheets (and Notion, I believe?). It’s a web interface to spreadsheets that supports Python code as formulas. (I’ve also tried Nocodb, another Notion alternative, and I much prefer Grist.)

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 1 points 37 minutes ago

update: I've installed forgejo! Super easy once I figured out I had to create a new user. I've set up a second origin for my repos called "local", since it will be a nice local backup for all my code.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I am, indeed, a developer. I might try locally hosting Gitea/Forgejo as an extra backup. I assume you can have multiple “origins” in git, right? That means I can back my repository to both codeberg and server.

Grist seems pretty cool too.

[–] excess0680@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

Absolutely! I have used multiple origins for posting my projects to Gitea/Forgejo and GitHub. You can also mirror repositories from one site to another, too, although it requires a clean slate for pulling from another remote.

The biggest use case for me is documenting (as code) my home network setup on my private forge.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] EpicFailGuy@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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.

https://github.com/TechHutTV/homelab/tree/main/media

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] NaibofTabr 19 points 2 days ago (7 children)

Actual Budget is an open-source envelope-style budgeting tool similar to YNAB. It has a self-hostable syncing service so that you can manage your budget across multiple devices.

The reason you might want to do this is that it's probably easier to do full account review sitting at your computer, but you might want to track expenses/receipts on your smartphone while you're away from home.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] elvith@feddit.org 11 points 1 day ago (3 children)

As you mentioned Immich, Nextcloud and Radicale - don't forget to make regular backups. If you haven't automated them, that's your next project now ;)

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

that seems quite important, I’ll do that then!

[–] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

And don't think that you can just back up using a file-copy process. These things have databases that also need to be backed up. It's not as simple as it first seems.

Source: been selfhosting for an embarrassingly long time without any backup!

[–] elvith@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago

Just a quick add on: not only do and automate backups - do also test them every now and then.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

How do I set up backups for Immich, Nextcloud, and Radicale? I see lots of different options, I can't pick!

[–] elvith@feddit.org 2 points 5 hours ago

I only host Nextcloud in an old setup (read pure PHP, MariaDB, Apache - no docker, etc.)

That server is set-up to be snapshotted daily. Also there's a script running about 30 min before each snap shot that will also dump the database to disk (as otherwise the snapshot might contain a random state of the database). It's not perfect, but it works - also because everything of this is done in the night, when I do not use the system, so chances are really low, that the snapshot of the disk and the database dump in it are not desynchronized too much.

I do not know what's the best practice for a modern Nextcloud setup with docker is or how to handle the other two...

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] ryan_harg@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

can I ask what is the advantage of radicale over nextcloud calendar sync?

[–] suzune@ani.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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".

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] vane@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 day ago

It’s searxng but yes. That is a good suggestion.

[–] perishthethought@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I want to add dockge, for making it easy to manage / update your docker containers.

https://github.com/louislam/dockge

Love it. Saves me lots of time.

[–] TurboLag@lemmings.world 2 points 1 day ago

If you don't want a GUI, dockcheck is an easy way to update many containers at once from the CLI.

[–] ragingHungryPanda@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago

What about AdGuard home, set your router to use your server as a DNS and get local network dns with adblocking?

[–] lanky_ginger@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago

Maybe Pihole/Adguard home?

[–] a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

Paperless-ngx - it allows you to upload important documents like receipts, contracts, etc. and uses OCR so you can search them

load more comments
view more: next ›