this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
178 points (96.8% liked)

Selfhosted

49528 readers
878 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
[–] kayohtie@pawb.social 1 points 1 day ago

Struggling to read all the comments on mobile so apologies if this is a duplicate, but if you need recipes, Tandoor Recipes. I use it for hosting my own edits of recipes. Since I do baking streams it's great for me to easily link to my stream for folks who want the same recipe including any tips I've added or variations, or something I've kinda come up with that's based off a standard formula.

Plus, using the Kitshn app on a tablet makes for an absolutely gorgeous kitchen companion for reading recipes. Split screening it between the recipe and the chat has been awesome. For real, Kitshn is absurdly polished for an open source app.

[–] DownByLaw@sh.itjust.works 58 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (6 children)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml 21 points 5 days ago (2 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 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (8 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.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] madcaesar@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How safe is it to self host something that you open up to the web? I've been thinking about a keepass self host, but I need it to be accessible from anywhere... I'm just really worried what that does once you open up your local server to the world

[–] KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

If you want to expose a container based service just for yourself over internet, you can -

  • If you have static IP4 or IPV6 - Setup Wireguard VPN on your homelab/server, and wireguard client on client devices[1].

  • If you are behind NAT or CGNAT - either Cloudflared Tunnel[2] or Tailscale[3].

In either scenarios, you need to setup firewall of your server to allow connection from LAN to port of your docker container/services. By default you should set your firewall to block all incoming request from anywhere except LAN.

I'm personally using Cloudflared Tunnel, but planning to migrate to Tailscale.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-wireguard-on-ubuntu-20-04

[2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/

[3] https://tailscale.com/

[–] themakara@lemmy.world 21 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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 5 days 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 5 days 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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 22 points 6 days ago (10 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 (10 replies)
[–] excess0680@lemmy.world 19 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days 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 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] kayohtie@pawb.social 1 points 1 day ago

I have mine configured with my SSO (Authentik) for login. It's nice being able to single pane login, and for services where it makes sense, utilize the LDAP outpost feature to login with the same username and password at least (Jellyfin, calibre-web).

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 6 points 5 days ago (6 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.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] Emotional@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 6 days ago

I love Grist!

My wife and I were frequent Google Sheet users and since a few years ago we started using Grist a lot. We tried some other alternatives before, but none of them felt even close to right for us.

[–] kristoff@infosec.pub 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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.

[–] EpicFailGuy@lemmy.world 15 points 6 days 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)
[–] foremanguy92_@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago

Little subquestion how fast is your nextclous instance? Cause mine is pretty slow don't really know why

[–] lanky_ginger@lemmy.world 16 points 6 days ago

Maybe Pihole/Adguard home?

[–] elvith@feddit.org 13 points 6 days ago (6 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 ;)

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] ryan_harg@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 6 days ago (3 children)

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

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] DrunkAnRoot@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Mozhi its searxng of translators

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 days ago

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

[–] a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world 12 points 6 days ago

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

[–] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 11 points 6 days ago (4 children)

I'm absolutely loving immich. Definitely check it out. Via Docker compise is a breeze.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] vane@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 5 days ago

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

[–] lemonuri@infosec.pub 9 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Snikket is easy to host in a docker container. You would have your own internet messenger for friends and family. Snikket is based on the xmpp protocol thats been around for 20 years, is tried and tested and very lightweight and does take very few resources on your server. things like Nintendo's messenger and WhatsApp are xmpp based).

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] hitmyspot@aussie.zone 9 points 6 days ago (3 children)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] ragingHungryPanda@lemmy.zip 6 points 5 days ago

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

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Run a RocketChat server for me so I don't have to pay $8/mo anymore

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] toketin@feddit.it 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Firefly III in order to track your expenses

[–] Provolone@lemmy.zip 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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 3 points 5 days ago

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

[–] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days 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.

[–] BroBot9000@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago (4 children)

I’m looking to get started with self hosting too. Could you share the links you used to get yourself set up?

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 9 points 6 days ago

Awesome SelfHosted is a great place to start looking: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] yaroto98@lemmy.org 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

I've been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.

First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you've not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don't want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.

I also recommend Pihole - it's an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It's really improved my experience on all my devices.

Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.

Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.

Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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?

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›