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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[–] kayohtie@pawb.social 2 points 4 days ago

Struggling to read all the comments on mobile so apologies if this is a duplicate, but if you need recipes, Tandoor Recipes. I use it for hosting my own edits of recipes. Since I do baking streams it's great for me to easily link to my stream for folks who want the same recipe including any tips I've added or variations, or something I've kinda come up with that's based off a standard formula.

Plus, using the Kitshn app on a tablet makes for an absolutely gorgeous kitchen companion for reading recipes. Split screening it between the recipe and the chat has been awesome. For real, Kitshn is absurdly polished for an open source app.

[–] DownByLaw@sh.itjust.works 61 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)
[–] TheTrueColonel@lemmynsfw.com 10 points 1 week 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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[–] KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 week ago (3 children)
  • 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 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)
  • 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.

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[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 22 points 1 week ago (10 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.

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[–] themakara@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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 4 points 1 week 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 6 points 1 week 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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[–] excess0680@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 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.)

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 week ago (6 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.

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

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[–] lanky_ginger@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago

Maybe Pihole/Adguard home?

[–] EpicFailGuy@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (4 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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[–] ryan_harg@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

[–] suzune@ani.social 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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".

Small update: Today I moved to Baikal successfully.

It's missing some features, I noticed.

  1. There are no shared addressbooks, so a shared user is needed. Addressbooks also cannot be read-only.
  2. There is no birthday calendar. There is a Python script for MySQL to run from cron. I ported it to PostgreSQL today.
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[–] elvith@feddit.org 13 points 1 week ago (6 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 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

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

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

[–] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm absolutely loving immich. Definitely check it out. Via Docker compise is a breeze.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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)

[–] cron@feddit.org 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Just as a side node, make sure to backup your immich / nextcloud services too.

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[–] kristoff@infosec.pub 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

[–] hitmyspot@aussie.zone 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)
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[–] BroBot9000@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week 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 week ago

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

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[–] yaroto98@lemmy.org 7 points 1 week 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.

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[–] lemonuri@infosec.pub 7 points 1 week 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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[–] vane@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 week ago

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

[–] ragingHungryPanda@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago

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

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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

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[–] BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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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[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (2 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.

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[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 5 points 1 week 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.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 5 points 1 week 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.

[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 week 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 week 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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[–] SilentKnightOwl@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 days ago

just installed it, and it works great :D

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.

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