this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Selfhosted

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What else should I self-host? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by sbeak@sopuli.xyz to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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!

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[–] kristoff@infosec.pub 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours 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.

[–] KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml 14 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
  • AdguardHome/Pi-Hole (for DNS Filter)
  • DrawIO (MS Visio equivalent)
  • Invidious (Youtube privacy frontend)
  • SearxNG (Google Privacy frontend)
  • Vaultwarden (Self-hosted Bitwarden server)
  • Miniflux (RSS Reader)
  • linkWarden (Link aggregator)

Also, checkout https://selfh.st/apps/

[–] ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 6 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (3 children)
  • SearxNG (Google Privacy frontend)

SearXNG is more than just a front end for google search, it’s an aggregator, if configured properly can collect results from Bing, Startpage, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, Brave.

[–] scroll_responsibly@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 hours ago

Yacy is a web crawler/search engine that IIRC you can self host and use as a SearXNG backend

[–] KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 hours ago

That's correct. Thanks for the correction.

[–] SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

I'm no expert, but I read that self hosting your own instance doesn't actually help with privacy since the search providers still track those requests and if you're the only one using it, that's just tracking you with extra steps.

Of course if you use a public instance, you have to then trust that the instance isn't tracking you

[–] KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago

Unless you are routing traffic through a VPN.

[–] ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 hours ago

While true, they still collect data on the results hosting your own instance can prevent you from hitting rate-limits as often.

[–] toketin@feddit.it 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Firefly III in order to track your expenses

[–] Provolone@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours 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.

[–] toketin@feddit.it 1 points 1 hour ago

Hi, I've tried Actual Budget but I've found more interesting in terms of options Firefly, so I've chosen for it :)

[–] themakara@lemmy.world 9 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours 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 3 points 7 hours 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 2 points 4 hours 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 1 points 5 hours 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.

[–] perishthethought@piefed.social 1 points 6 hours 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 1 points 2 hours ago

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

[–] vane@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

searchxng, libretranslate

[–] aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 10 hours ago

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

[–] DownByLaw@sh.itjust.works 50 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (7 children)

Just from the top of my head:

Edit: I left out some stuff that you or others already mentioned. But here’s the extended list so I can copy/paste this if someone else asks in the future.

Honorable mention:

[–] TheTrueColonel@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 4 hours ago

As someone who works in security, I don't personally recommend self hosting your password manager unless you're planning on never opening it up outside your network or you're willing to be on top of all potential security issues. These are your account credentials we're talking about. You WANT them safe, and the people paid to make sure they stay secure are likely going to do a better job than you.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 2 points 12 hours ago

That’s a big list. I already use joplin, but never knew you could self-host syncing! I’ll do that then :D

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[–] ragingHungryPanda@lemmy.zip 4 points 15 hours ago

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

[–] EpicFailGuy@lemmy.world 13 points 20 hours ago (1 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

[–] aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

From what I have seen, oracle is not a good host. They randomly delete servers for no reason. I’d steer clear of oracle

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 hours ago

I know. I'm just saying, don't use them if you don't want ot constantly reinstall your server

[–] excess0680@lemmy.world 15 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (2 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 4 points 12 hours 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 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 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.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Should I get Gitea or Forgejo? Forgejo seems to be a more free/libre fork of Gitea, the latter of which is influenced by a for-profit company. Is Forgejo functionally equivalent to Gitea, and if not, what are the differences? If they are basically the same I would probably go with Forgejo over Gitea. Is Forgejo's documentation and setup similar, better, or worse than Gitea?

[–] excess0680@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago

I haven’t looked much into the differences, but from my brief research, it appears that Forgejo has just recently updated such that migration from Gitea is no longer possible. I knew that they had become a “hard” fork last year but it has now diverged.

From a feature standpoint, I know that Forgejo is working on Fediverse integration. Beyond that, I think the differences are less apparent.

So to answer your question, I use Gitea and have for a long time. They’ll still remain MIT-licensed even if it’s no longer fully open source. However, the owning company can (and may) cease open source development. If I had known of Forgejo breaking away earlier, or if I were a new user, I would have probably started with Forgejo. That’s my recommendation.

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[–] elvith@feddit.org 10 points 19 hours 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 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

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

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] elvith@feddit.org 1 points 9 hours ago

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

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