I just recently started playing around with an old pc as my homeserver and am curious of any recommendations for lesser known self hostable foss software that you would recommend
- Caddy - Reverse proxy
- Owncast - Twitch alternative
- Jellyfin - Home video streaming application
- Joplin - Note taking app that syncs
- Syncthing - syncs files from my LineageOS (Android) phones to PC
- PiHole - AD blocker
- Minetest - open source voxel game engine (basically Minecraft)
- Veloren - open source adventure game
- Invidious - frontend for Youtube
- Libreddit - frontend for Reddit (about to stop working)
- Proxitok - frontend for TikTok
- Nitter - frontend for Twitter
- Rimgo - frontend for Imgur
- Libremdb - frontend for IMDB
Edit: Fixed PiHole from saying “VPN” blocker to “AD” :-D
Are we sure Libreddit will stop working? The latest post from Reddit states that less than 100 api calls per second will remain free if you’re logged in. I’m not exactly sure how Libreddit works (I use a self-hosted Troddit instance) but it’s my understanding that API calls tied to your own user should be fine as long as you stick under than 100/sec limit.
Just going off what they said:
I’m using the following:
Plex for music/anime/tv/movies, calibre webserver for ebooks/manga, qbittorrent web+Prowlarr to search for and download content, SyncThing to keep things in sync between my server and desktop, and I’m also file sharing with nicotine++
pihole/adblock monero node/support monero network p2pool/mining pool for monero wireguard/vpn Tor relay, i have thought of using an old pc to support Tor
Miniflux as an RSS reader
I actually was looking around for rss readers, but havent found one that can save entire articles and serves them offline. Does this support that?
From the things I use:
- Uptime Kuna, for monitoring the availability of websites/services
- Gitea, for hosting code
- PicoShare, for sharing files
- Maddy, for email
How has your experience hosting your own email been? I often hear that the big providers (Google, Microsoft, etc.) will simply drop your sent mails.
I also host my own mail and there’s been little issues.
Microsoft is a pain in the ass if you’re in an IP space they don’t like like DigitalOcean. Which is ironic because they have the worst spam filter by far in the industry.
If you want to get through to everyone you will have to:
- Use a “good” TLD ( not .to, not .xyz, …)
- Don’t use cloud platforms that are regularily used for spam (mostly DigitalOcean)
- Use SPF
- Use DMARC
- Use DKIM
- Use a PTR record
- Don’t make an open relay by accident
- Use proper ports and certificates
- Register an abuse account at the big players (Google, Microsoft, …)
- Don’t use an dynamic IP
- Keep it up to date
- Minimize downtime
I can’t recommend mailcow enough, it makes setting up a mail server a breeze.
https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized
Use the MXToolbox to verify your server(s).
- Portainer server and agent for monitoring all docker hosts in one place
- Traefik as reverse proxy
- Dashy (complex) and Homarr (simpler) as dashboards
- Gluetun for VPN access for containers and proxy for everyone on the network
- Radarr/Sonarr for managing Movies and TV shows
- Navidrome for music
- Audiobookshelf for audiobooks
- Transmission/qbittorrent/rtorrent/deluge as torrent clients
- Pinhole for DNS
- Technitium for more advanced DNS and DHCP (might replace all piholes with this or blocky in the future)
- Plex/Jellyfin for media streaming
- JellyfinVue - awesome frontend to jellyfin
- Bazarr - for subtitles
Caddy is simpler for the reverse proxy. Just sharing for people that get scared when they try to set up Traefik.
Honestly I started using traefik first and I agree, the learning curve is steep. I’m only just now starting to understand what my labels are doing. But now, I’ve tried caddy and literally cannot get it to work, or find how to port what I have on traefik over to caddy lol.
Here are all the steps after installing Caddy to create a reverse proxy with SSL:
- Open the
/etc/caddy/Caddyfilefile - Add the following, replacing the domain and port with those that you want to use.
reverse_proxy localhost:8080}
- Restart Caddy with
systemctl restart caddy
Super interesting. I’ll have to experiment with this, the guides I found were not this straight forward. Thanks!
- Open the
Ngnix-proxy-manager is even simpler :) But along with the automatic router creation using labels, I’ve found traefik to be the most robust of all three.
The traefik syntax and configuration using yaml is really initutive. I can link a good guide here if someone wants it. The official documentation isn’t that good.
One of my favourite guides explaining the configuration files for traefik.
Nginx proxy manager is simple, but I can’t manage to make it work with https on porkbun. Nginx-proxy works just fine and it’s probably the simplest i’ve seen.
That is pretty cool :) I have a domain on porbunk too but even up putting DNS on cloudflare because porkbum uses cloudflare anyway but doesn’t expose most of the features. Kind of a loss loss. Cloudflare works with pretty much everything.
I’ll check out nginx-proxy. Have heard good things about swag too. How is the setup on nginx-proxy compared to other options?
I didn’t know that about porkbun.
Basically you run the container and then put a couple environment variables in the containers you want to proxy and it handles all of it for you, including certs. Just works.
Thanks. Seems pretty much identical to traefik which makes sense because I think most of reverse proxies just use LetsEncrypt underneath.
Please do! I have been trying to set up remote access to a server I have, and there seems to be so many solutions and all seem very complex.
Have linked one :) For remote access, I wouldn’t necessarily use traefik at the edge. The safest solution would probably installing zerotier/tailscale on the remote server and accessing traefik through that. That way you don’t have to expose unnecessary parts or worry about robustness of authentication etc.
If it is a single computer you can easily make a two computer network using the instructions from wireguard archwiki page and you’re all set :)
Ooh. I signed up for tailscale, but havent gotten the configuration right I think. Also signed up for NextDNS. Got some work to do but no longer have the time.
What I actually want to do is make it so I can give out accounts to services to my family and girlfriend so they can watch movies and whatever.
Tailscale is one step to many. I think I will need to purchase a domain name or set up a VPN, which seems a little scary to me.
Home Assistant! You can host it inside a VM.
I’ve got a pretty booring setup compared to most 🤣. Ubuntu Server running the following in docker,
- Plex
- Audiobookshelf
- Komga
Audiobookshelf has come a really long way. The version out now is heaps and bounds better than what it was 1 year ago.
Here are a few I like:
- Jellyfin - a media server software that allows you to organize and stream your personal media collection.
- NextCloud - a self-hosted file sync and sharing platform. Not as good as Google Drive (of course), but it can do the job.
- Bitwarden (with a Rust-written alternative named vaultwarden) - a password manager for storing and autofilling login credentials.
- Matrix - an open network for secure, decentralized communication. WhatsApp, but in the Fediverse.
- PiHole - a DNS sinkhole that blocks ads and other unwanted content.
- Mycroft - an open-source voice assistant. You can make your own Google Home with it.
- OctoPrint - web interface that allows you to control 3D printers. Pretty handy if you have one!
- Gitea - a lightweight self-hostable GitHub
- Home Assistant - an open-source home automation platform. Can integrate a lot of other things in your house, including some of the things I mentioned above.
- The X-arr initiative - a collection of tools for managing and organizing media libraries. Pretty good if you deploy your own media server:
- Sonarr - Select TV shows and it will automatically download episodes for you.
- Radarr -> movies
- Lidarr -> music
!selfhost@lemmy.ml
https://lemmy.ml/c/selfhost(still don’t know how to link communitys here)
Syncthing to replace Google drive and Photoprism for Photos. Both have a great functionality and run well on my 12yrs old home server with 2gb of ram.
I’m really happy with Photoprism as well, it’s great to have facial recognition without relying on Google Photos
Yeah, and syncing is so easy, I just press a button and don’t care about it.
These are the ones I use most actively, on my FreedomBox:
- bepasty for moving around or sharing temporary files
- Quassel for staying connected to IRC servers
- Radicale for synchronizing my calendar and tasks.
- Syncthing for files I want to have available between my laptop, desktop, phone.
- Tiny Tiny RSS for following blogs.
Here are some I find really useful:
- Jellyfin (media interface)
- paperless-ng (document store with OCR, tagging, search, etc.)
- Miniflux (RSS reader)
First time hearing of Paperless. That’s super cool!
Thanks, paperless will be really useful at uni
Personally, as well as NextCloud, I’d host instances of LibreX, CloudTube, PiHole, Gitea, XMPP, and CryptPad.
If it’s fun you’re after, though, why not try hosting a Minecraft server? And how about XMPP or Matrix, to keep in touch with friends?
What’s your xmpp server of choice?
I haven’t really looked into it much, as I don’t currently have enough time or money to self-host anything, but I’d probably go with Prosody to start with.
I have two instances of BookStack. A public-facing one for bird stuff, and one for home stuff. I also self-host an instance of Plausible Analytics as a privacy-respecting alternative to Google Analytics.
