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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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[-] [email protected] 19 points 1 day 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/

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour 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

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago

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

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[-] [email protected] 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.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 5 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.

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[-] [email protected] 58 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 day 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.

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Firefly III in order to track your expenses

[-] [email protected] 3 points 17 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.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago

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

[-] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.)

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 day 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.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 day 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

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[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

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 ;)

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 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...

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

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

[-] [email protected] 2 points 17 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!

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

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

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[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

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

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

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".

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[-] [email protected] 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.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago
[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

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

[-] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago

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.

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[-] [email protected] 5 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?

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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
168 points (97.2% liked)

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