I’ve been around selfhosting most of my life and have seen a variety of different setups and reasons for selfhosting. For myself, I don’t really self host as mant services for myself as I do infrastructure. I like to build out the things that are usually invisible to people. I host some stuff that’s relatively visible, but most of my time is spent building an over engineered backbone for all the services I could theoretically host. For instance, full domain authentication and oversight with kerberized network storage, and both internal and public DNS.
The actual services I host? Mail and vaultwarden, with a few (i.e. < 3) more to come.
I absolutely do not need the level of infrastructure I need, but I honestly prefer that to the majority of possible things I could host. That’s the fun stuff to me; the meat and potatoes. But I know some people do focus more on the actual useful services they can host, or on achieving specific things with their self hosting. What types of things do you host and why?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web HTTPS HTTP over SSL IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email IP Internet Protocol LAMP Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP stack for webhosting NAS Network-Attached Storage NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) Plex Brand of media server package SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption SSO Single Sign-On Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging k8s Kubernetes container management package nginx Popular HTTP server
23 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #871 for this sub, first seen 15th Jul 2024, 16:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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Home Assistant
There’s no fucking way I’m using a cloud service to control parts of my home, that just feels so wrong to me on so many levels -
Nextcloud
There’s no way I’m saving my files on someone else’s computer (the Cloud). Even with encryption, it’s expensive. Hard drives are cheap. Put them in a server, install Nextcloud and you have your private, cheap, independent cloud service. -
Immich (currently migrating to Ente) for my photos
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Jellyfin + arr Stack
I’m not paying $100/month for 5 different streaming services to have access to all the content I like. -
Navidrome for my (pirated) music
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Audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts
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Pi-Hole with Unbound set up as a recursive resolver, cause why should I trust someone else with DNS?
I also self-host Matrix or Revolt servers as well as game servers for me and my friends, because it’s much cheaper than getting VPS or a hosted option, and I already have this server that I use for a bunch of other stuff, so I can also just use it for that.
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Public services: my social network(hubzilla), Email(mailcow), Matrix chat, Peertube.
Private: my media (jellyfin, audiobookshelf, calibre, homeassistant.
I enjoy the freedom that comes with this and its like having your own home on the internet. I have a very modest setup but its enough to host my friends and family so nothing fancy like k8s. Just a refurbished optiplex running docker :)
Everything
Masochism, paranoia.
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Bittersweet chocolate chips: We melt 60% cacao bittersweet chocolate baking chips into the buttery base.
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Butter: The unsalted butter in this recipe operates like an emulsifier—stabilizing the fat and the liquids—resulting in a tender cookie.
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Eggs: We rely on eggs to help leaven and form the shape of these chocolate brownie cookies.
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Sugar: The sugar imparts sweet notes into these brownie cookies while caramelizing their edges.
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Vanilla extract: We add a splash of vanilla extract to help enhance the sweetness of the chocolate in these brownie cookies.
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Petunias: Pretty petunias are popular because of their exceptionally long flowering period. As with most annuals, they get leggy by midsummer, so you’ll want to prune the shoots back by half. See more tips on planting and caring for petunias to keep them blooming.
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(Preface: almost all of this is handled in a single Nix config, and no docker in use at all)
At home, in a two-hosts Proxmox cluster:
- blocky for adblocking
- a full *arr stack with torrents and nzbs for uuuuuuhhh Linux ISOs
- Jellyfin so friends and family can watch, I mean use the Linux ISOs
- Paperless (HIGHLY recommend)
- Wastebin (Pastebin alternative)
- Sterling-PDF (also really recommend, allowed me to get rid of Acrobat Reader for filling out and signing PDFs, plus a bunch more)
- Homeassistant
- Linux and Windows clients available for whenever you might need them (not often, but can come in handy)
- Borg client, backing up parts of my NAS to a cloud storage box
- OPNSense backup for the hardware firewall
- Forgejo
On a bare metal machine at a reputable cloud provider:
- my personal Email, Calendar, Contacts (super easy with Nix)
- another blocky instance
- another borg client
- Rustdesk server (OSS Teamviewer)
- wireguard that’s just used by my TV so crunchyroll thinks it’s in (other country), Lmao
Wishlist:
- Vaultwarden
- Immich, once added to nixpkgs
- PeerTube
- Pixelfed
If you want to keep everything inside a singular Nix configuration while still using Docker, you can check out the NixOS option
virtualisation.oci-containers
- essentially, a declarative way of managing docker/podman containers (similar to docker-compose) but with Nix.I know it’s been three weeks, but thanks for telling me about this! I might actually do this, for the projects here and there which aren’t packaged into nixpkgs (yet).
I’ve seen a few mentions of PiHole and AdguardHome, I started on PiHole, then moved to AdguardHome for adblocking. Then I heard about and have been using TechnitiumDNS server which is sort of overkill for our needs, but with the right ad-lists, it is fantastic at blocking advertisements on my home network. Super fast install too, even on a Raspberry Pi 2 :) I run that along with Proxmox-VE (Protected behind OIDC Login) and several other containers on my cranky old Dell Desktop server.
Mostly Vaultwarden, and a few other services for home private use such as PairDrop for inter system sharing and a self destructing file sharing server for when we need to send documents to our Attorney’s (rarely but sometimes we need to) office via Pingvin.
I also run:
- Home Assistant
- Transmission Dockerized so I can help contribute to the Linux community and share the ISO’s.
- For some of my externalized sites, I run Authentik It acts sort of like a Reverse Proxy if you configure it to do so. I love that I can simply identify myself with my WebAuthn device skipping any passwords. :)
With Authentik setup, I can login to things like my Fresh Tomato Router TechnitiumDNS (Both use HTTP Auth headers) and Memos which uses OIDC/SSO. It’s meant to replace our Google Keep notes.
- Tailscale is installed and I connect to it from my phone when away from home to always stay on my network. Sometimes, hotspots block it so I generally avoid those as much as possible.
- Wallos to help keep track of our re-occuring subscriptions.
- Grafana and Promethus - both are staged and ready for configuration and one of those I will get around to eventually.
- InfluxDB - I plan on moving Home Assistsant logging soon to that which should tie nicely into Grafana later.
- Ben Phelps’ Homepage - it’s my main server dashboard my wife and I use to access our server. Quite simply one of the best dashboards IMHO.
- Wyze Cam Bridge - One of the better services in which you can log into your Wyze cams and convert their streams to RTSP, RTMP or HLS streams easily. I have that feed to my Home Assistant Security Dashboard.
- Baserow It’s a good Airtable alternative and I use it to keep track of my Static IP assignments, Sleep tracker (I suffer from insomnia), and other data points. It’s pretty amazing. I even created a pain logging for for my wife so she just accesses it and answers basic questions about her pain levels and it pushes it to the database for later retrieval.
- Joplin Server - Sorry, I don’t have the link, but it’s installed via compose. I use Joplin Notes on my phone and computer for keeping my code snippets. I’ve tried Obsidian and it didn’t really meet my needs and Also Anytype, but that’s not self-hosted. Joplin server is for me and that’s become handy a time or two when on the road.
- Bookstack - my grand plan for that is to build a Wiki for my family to use in the event something should happen to me, they can know how to manage the server with nice screenshots and instructional steps. I have that protected behind Authentik’s OIDC logins.
- IT-Tools - hands down one of the coolest self hosted tool sets you can use.
- Webcheck - All-in-one OSINT tool for analyzing any website https://web-check.xyz/ is their demo site. :)
- Stirling PDF - Kind of like a Swiss-army knife for PDF’s. :)
- Dozzle - For those times with you really need to see what your Docker logs and too lazy do run a
docker logs -follow
command.
I still use Portainer-CE and am happy there, I may try Dockage or the others, but it’s fine for what I need it for (It’s also protected by OIDC)
I’m sure I may have missed a few, but this post has gone on long enough. :)
A bunch of people recommend dozzle in this thread… I’ve been using Dockge. I wonder how they compare. I’ll have to check that out later.
Dozzle is just log viewing plain and simple. Dockge shows more that’s all I know. I tested Dockge earlier on in development and haven’t been back since, I know it’s grown a lot more since.
It’s not so much that Dockge shows more, and more that it does more. Log viewing in Dockge is actually pretty bad; it’s honestly the one thing that really needs more work. But Dockge is a full management plane; it allows you to deploy, modify, bring up and bring down entire compose stacks. Dozzle is only a log viewer, nothing else. Given that log viewing is the one thing Dockge does badly, they’re actually a perfect complement to each other, and I’d strongly recommend running both.