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!

  • DownByLaw@sh.itjust.works
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    13 days ago

    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:

    • zeroIncentive@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      Why not Jellyfin for music? I’m curious as I run plex and Plexamp myself but have been considering switching over to Jellyfin for media.

      • pory@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        I use Navidrome for music because Jellyfin’s Android TV client still can’t handle playlist lengths above 300 songs.

      • jake@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        I use Jellyfin for movies and TV shows, but never tried for music because I already had Navidrome set up. It is so good, really one of my all-time favourite pieces of software. It greatly repays a well-tagged collection, relying on embedded metadata only. Not sure how Jellyfin works here, maybe there is some ability to scrape album info from online sources (?), but I believe it’s pretty strict about directory structure (one folder per album), which Navidrome doesn’t care about.

      • DownByLaw@sh.itjust.works
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        13 days ago

        I’ve set up navidrome a long time ago, way before I’ve started using Jellyfin. And it just runs like a charm paired with some great clients for the subsonic ecosystem. So honestly it never even occurred to me to use Jellyfin for music.

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzOP
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      12 days ago

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

  • excess0680@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    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.)

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzOP
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      12 days ago

      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
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        12 days ago

        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.

        • sbird@sopuli.xyzOP
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          12 days ago

          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
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            12 days 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.

          • PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world
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            12 days ago

            Forgejo is a fork from gitea that is made for us. Forgejo is the new gitea.

            There was some licensing or something, some kind of disagreement I don’t recall. Forgejo is the one that is still free and open source.

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzOP
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      11 days 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.

  • Karna@lemmy.ml
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    12 days ago
    • 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
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      12 days ago
      • 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.

      • SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        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

          • nfreak@lemmy.ml
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            11 days ago

            I just recently started routing mine through a gluetun container, but now I’m hitting timeouts pretty consistently. Not sure if there’s a solution to that or just deal with it.

        • ohshit604@sh.itjust.works
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          12 days ago

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

    • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      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

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzOP
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      12 days 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.

  • EpicFailGuy@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    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

  • themakara@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago
    • 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

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzOP
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      13 days ago

      I’m already hosting Immich, I feel it was the most painless to set up out of the three. There was a weird error with python modules with radicale and Nextcloud was a bit more complex to set up, but they were all relatively easy to get started with.

      I particularly like Immich’s mobile app. I just clicked a few buttons and BOOM all my photos are backed up (you can even change what albums to include and exclude, and duplicates are automatically removed e.g. if you have the same photo in multiple albums)

  • BroBot9000@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

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

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzOP
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      12 days ago

      Radicale’s official documentation didn’t help me much, so I followed some youtube video (by “Awesome Open Source”) where you use a docker image instead of a python venv + pip install.

      For Immich, official docs were fantastic!

      For Nextcloud, I followed Learn Linux TV’s “How to Set Up Nextcloud on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS” (though I used Debian, not Ubuntu)

    • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.

      There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.

  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    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.

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzOP
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      12 days ago

      Ooh, I didn’t know you could self-host joplin sync! I’ve been using backblaze for quite a long time for that.

  • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    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.

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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    13 days ago

    I host a number of alternate frontends. Alexandrite for Lemmy, Redlib for Reddit, Invidious for Youtube. And then I have the Privacy Redirect extension make any links to Reddit or Youtube go to my local.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      Invidious

      How do you keep Invidious running? I’ve tried all the alternatives like Piped, etc. I can’t keep them running for more than a week before it gets banhammered by Google.

      • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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        13 days ago

        Well, its apparently borked and I didn’t realize it. I’ve never gotten an IP ban but I also wasn’t using it a ton - mostly just for when I’d search for instructions on something an a YT vid was my only option.

        I mainly use Nebula for watching videos. And the handful of creators I follow who are strictly youtube, get slurped up by ytdlp via Pinchflat

        • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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          12 days ago

          mostly just for when I’d search for instructions on something an a YT vid was my only option.

          That was basically what I wanted to use it for. There are several fairly reliable Invidious instances still left. yewtu.be comes to mind and inv.nadeko.net. But it’s hit and miss, and it gets pretty janky having to refresh the instance, then pick a new instance, then Anubis weighs your soul to see if you are allowed to view content. But, like you say, if that’s the only video tut you can find… I usually just download the video and when done, delete it. Trying to jump through YouTube’s hoops is a futile endeavor. They’ve made it so painful to watch content on their platform while still trying to retain as much of your data as possible. Screw 'em.