this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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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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[–] DownByLaw@sh.itjust.works 47 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)
[–] TheTrueColonel@lemmynsfw.com 6 points 9 hours 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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[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 18 points 1 day ago (2 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.

[–] witx@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I just cannot get this working without HTTPS even though it says in the documentation it's not required. I think I'm going with Firefly-iii

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[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

Actual has been great for my partner and me. Highly recommend!

[–] excess0680@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 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.)

[–] Emotional@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 day 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.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 4 points 18 hours ago (1 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.

[–] excess0680@lemmy.world 3 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (4 children)

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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[–] lanky_ginger@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago

Maybe Pihole/Adguard home?

[–] EpicFailGuy@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (3 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

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[–] a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago

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

[–] ryan_harg@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 3 points 18 hours 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.

[–] suzune@ani.social 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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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[–] elvith@feddit.org 10 points 1 day ago (3 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 ;)

[–] ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yes, back up your stuff regularly, don’t be like me and break your partition table with a 4 month gap between backups. Accomplishing 4 months of work in 5 hours is not fun.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 3 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] elvith@feddit.org 2 points 15 hours ago

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

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[–] themakara@lemmy.world 10 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours 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 3 points 12 hours 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 3 points 9 hours 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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[–] hitmyspot@aussie.zone 8 points 1 day ago (3 children)
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[–] yaroto98@lemmy.org 7 points 1 day 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.

[–] irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago

If she has an Android, you can use the DNS blocker in ReThink to do something similar to pihole outside of your LAN. That's what I use. There are others, but ReThink is pretty good and has lots of other stuff it can do as well, or just use the DNS option.

[–] lemonuri@infosec.pub 7 points 1 day 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).

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[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day 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 2 points 1 hour 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?

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[–] BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

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[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 5 points 1 day ago

Syncthing for files syncing, to replace stuff like OneDrive, Dropbox etc.

I use to sync files between my NAS, laptop, Steam Deck and phone, each with different dirs based on what I need synced there.

[–] vane@lemmy.world 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)
[–] aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 16 hours ago

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

[–] BroBot9000@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day 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 1 day ago

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

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[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 4 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

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

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[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 day ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Mordikan@kbin.earth 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Is Invidious still working? After the latest round of API patches on Youtube's end, I didn't think it was.

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[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 4 points 1 day ago

If you're just looking for something to chew up CPU cycles and don't know what to host, consider something like BOINC where you're "self-hosting" (extremely loose term) scientific research, like cancer, new drugs, etc.

[–] SilentKnightOwl@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 day ago

Karakeep is fantastic, I know you mentioned it already, but I just wanted to shout it out. The AI tagging is a little gimmicky and pointless, but it's super nice to have a really searchable, automatically organized bookmark manager.

[–] kristoff@infosec.pub 4 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours 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.

I look at what services I use and see if I can replace any of them w/ a self-hosted solution. Rinse and repeat.

Looking for more stuff to host will just overcomplicate things. I instead try to look for ways to consolidate services down.

[–] ragingHungryPanda@lemmy.zip 4 points 21 hours ago

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

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Straying away from utilities, games are always fun to host. I got started with self hosting by hosting a minecraft server, but there are plenty of options.

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[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Why Radicale when you have a caldav-capable calendar in NC?

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 2 points 18 hours ago

I hosted Radicale first, so already had my calendar events and such set.

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