What things do you self host (or know about) that are fun/interesting/useful to you? I’m thinking of setting up a home server and am looking for things that would be useful or fun for me to run on it. I want to host things that are useful/fun, but not a project itself (I’ve got enough projects), if that makes sense.
Most of the lists I see online are mostly lists of technical projects like docker, kubernetes, grafana, nginx, etc. I see these as infrastructure rather than the interesting project itself. ETA: the infra is important, but not “interesting” in this context as I deal with infra at my day job.
Examples of the type of service I’m looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation… What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?
Edit: thank you everyone for your awesome responses!
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For LLM hosting, ik_llama.cpp. You can really gigantic models at acceptable speeds with its hybrid CPU/GPU focus, at higher quality/speed than mainline llama.cpp, and it has several built in UIs.
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LanguageTool, for self run grammar/spelling/style checking.
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I don’t see any mention of games so far.
A minecraft server is always a good time with friends, and there are hundreds of other game servers you can self host.
Home Assistant.
If you want smart devices but not the data collection that goes with it, then Home Assistant is your friend. Just be forewarned that it is a seriously deep rabbit hole.
Hello from the rabbit hole. I haven’t seen the light of day in years.
I barely know what food, water or sleep is anymore. But hey! I can turn my lights off and have them come on when sunset occurs. Or they track when I leave my apartment complex property with my cellphone so I don’t waste power and there’s no 3rd party corpo breathing down my shoulder.
I spun it up it up in may to fool around. Today I opened a brand new air purifier and imeaditley disassembled it to flash ESPHome firmware on it. It never once ran stock.
I used them for Christmas lights with that sundown condition (+just a time trigger for off at night).
Also came in handy for a light switch that was unfortunately on the wrong side from a table, now its just uses a motion sensor when someone walks to the kitchen and tells a third reality smart switch (screws on top of regular switch, so it works with any light type (e.g. fluorescent)) and is renter friendly.
Bonus points for no lag at all compared to crappy cloud dependent garbage and no need for apps for each device manufacturer. Just look if it is home assistant compatible and no cloud before buying devices since it us a lot harder or impossible in some cases to de-cloud them later.
Edit: plus same motion sensor concept to link several lights on the living room (those are just dimmable smart lights on table and floor lamps). Makes the place look cozy and feel well illuminated vs the usual single light with a wall switch. Aquara Wireless clicker to toggle between dim percentages. Its awesome (third reality or other home assistant friendly brand would work, I just already had this one).
Personally:
Nextcloud (file backup and so much more, I use it to backup files from my computer. Might explore some of the other features soon)
Immich (image backup, I use it to back up photos from my camera + phone)
Radicale (CalDAV + CardDAV for calendar and contacts sync)
Forgejo (GitHub alternative, and the backend of Codeberg! I use this as a local backup to my git repos in addition with cloud backup with Codeberg. They work nice together, when you set two remotes per git repo)
Vikunja (to-do list syncing, don’t use this anymore as I mostly use Joplin for this now)
Joplin (Markdown editor, supports cloud sync with nextcloud, I use this for both notes and to-dos!)
I used to run ConvertX (to convert any file type, whether it’s document, image, video, etc. Think a self-hosted CloudConvert), but I somehow messed up the user permissions and couldn’t log in (100% user error on my part), so I didn’t bother.
Another thing, “Navidrome” is a self-hosted spotify alternative (I don’t use it, I just have the MP3s and OGGs stored locally for offline playback!)
Jellyfin is a self-hosted netflix alternative. Where you get the media is up to you…
I run all of this on my old laptop with Debian installed, and it works quite well!
What does Radicale do that Nextcloud doesn’t with CalDAV and CardDAV?
I set up Radicale first, and never bothered to switch. Also, something about putting all your eggs in one basket.
Home Assistant seems like a really good option if you want smart home stuff, but I personally have a “dumb” home and not planning on getting wifi light bulbs any time soon.
Game servers are always fun! I set up a custom Minecraft modpack and have it set up on my domain. I also run an Arma 3 server, but it’s a hackjob of a self-host solution and I’m ashamed of how it works.
To address your examples directly:
Media server: Jellyfin, along with an *arr stack (Radarr, Sonarr, and qbittorrent and gluetun) to automate everything for you.
Photos app: Immich is your direct Google Photos replacement. Automated uploads, object detection, facial recognition, etc, all ran locally on your machine. Just remember: you still need a proper backup!
Recipe management: Mealie is the best I’ve used. It can import a recipe from almost any website. Very easy to cook with and follow along each step. It also lets you categorize meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), rate your meals, and randomly pick meals for you.
Other things I have going:
Frigate NVR - A couple PoE and wifi cameras set up around the home record everything. Frigate records and timestamps things based on the settings - A person walks up, something loud happens, etc. My only gripe is that there isn’t a good Android app to go with it. I’d like to receive notifications on my phone, too.
MeTube - Rip videos from almost anything. Friend sent you an Instagram video, but you don’t have Instagram? Chuck it into this and it’ll give you the video. Here’s all the websites it supports.
My only gripe is that there isn’t a good Android app to go with it. I’d like to receive notifications on my phone, too.
Home Assistant can do notifications for Frigate that are very similar to Ring’s notifications.
IDK how Frigate handles alerts, but Blue Iris will write an alert to MQTT topic if it matches object recog, and I have an app MQTT Alert that watches that and goes nuts if it comes up. The BI android app is underwhelming in its alerts.
I’d have to figure Frigate has some sort of MQTT capability. I tried using Frigate but it was pretty basic for my needs, so I moved on.
Is there documentation and stuff for an Android app to be built? I might be interested in building one.
https://github.com/sfortis/frigate-viewer
This is the closest thing to an android app, but it just adds a check to see if you’re on your local network or not. Other than that, it’s just a web frontend.
The frigate documentation also has some info about installing it as an app, but either I’m doing it wrong or it’s the equivalent of a bookmark on my homescreen.
Yeah, that’s a progressive web app, not a native Android app. I’ll check it out, I have a few cameras I want to play with.
Here are some of the things I self host that I haven’t seen mentioned:
- Continuwuity is a chat server that talks Matrix, so you can join the chat rooms of a lot of open source projects or make end to end encrypted private chats
- Forgejo is a self-hosted code forge (github alternative) - very useful
- FreshRSS is a good one if you like to follow blogs, newsletters or pretty much anything ‘news’
- Grafana plus VictoriaMetrics and/or Quickwit is very useful for keeping track of the health of all your services
- Homepage is a… homepage for all your services
- Stalwart gives you a mail server. Set it up for any other projects that need to send mail, or as a backup for your emails, contacts or calendars - it’s the easiest way to set that up self hosted. Making it suitable as your main email may need more effort (delivery).
- Related to Continuwuity / matrix, you can set up the Mautrix collection of bridges, which let you bridge Discord, WhatsApp, IRC, telegram, and more into your matrix account or chats seamlessly.
- LMS (lightweight Media Server, not to be confused with Logitech Media Server) is an alternative to Navidrome that I find works better with my library tagging and ListenBrainz
- Speakr - audio transcription with diarisation. Very useful if you like to record meetings.
Searxng. Just use a private instance.
I couldn’t make it work whatever I did, whichever instance I used it seemed to get rate limited after a while or showing weird results…
Couple of things I have running on my home server no one has mentioned yet.
FoundryVTT is a self-hostable platform for playing tabletop RPGs online. It supports a vast selection of game systems and user/community developed mods making it extremely versatile.
Pihole is probably something you’ve heard of before and despite the name is hostable on a wide variety of systems. In case you haven’t it’s a network level ad blocker that works by taking over the role of DNS server on your LAN and blocking queries to domains used to serve ads or track telemetry.
Jellyfin and Immich, first and foremost. From there, Nextcloud, Home Assistant, RustDesk, Docmost, and Nephele.
(Full disclosure: Nephele is my own service. I find it quite useful.)
Speaking of RustDesk, I think that Meshcentral is also a very good software to remotely control your devices.
RustDesk is shady Chinese software and not recommended.
EDIT: Source (Reddit)
Headscale with headplane UI for access across servers
Openwebui for LLM stuff with tika for doc processing
Nextcloud for data and such
Immich(migrating away from photoprism) for better photo management and phone upload
Caddy for reverse proxy
Not used as much: Monica for contact management Mealie for its ease of importing recipes
Keep an eye on Open Web UI. I’ve heard rumblings that it’s starting to enshittify.
Thanks for the heads up! I’ll keep that on my radar. It would be unfortunate if the rumbles are true
I just found and set up Gameyfin (a play on Jellyfin). Still in the testing it out phase, but I love the idea of a collection of my friends and my DRM free games that we can all share with less reliance on big companies.
- media: jellyfin for videos, navidrome for music
- photos: immich
- game servers: +1 to foundryvtt if you’re into tabletop rpgs. While the core software isn’t open source, most systems are, and the pf2e system in particular is the best virtual tabletop experience you’ll have on any platform.
- recipes: i settled on tandoor. Very much a fan of it.
- if you’re a data nerd then chartdb for database diagraming, and cloudbeaver for database management
Tandoor: I ended up there because it has an API that I can access and cross-reference to my grocer (Kroger.com also has API) to get current pricing, calculate recipe costs, nutrient costs, or find what’s on special this week. It’s theoreticcally possible, but I haven’t sorted out how to integrate that directly into tandoor & its shopping lists.
Nice! I haven’t dug into the API yet. The big thing for me was actually pretty small feature but tandoor let’s me scale recipes up and down on the fly with just a click of a button. I couldn’t find that in Mealie. We do a lot of home cooking for guests and large parties so being able to quickly see the portions and scale a recipe up/down saves a lot of mental math or errors.
Edit: though looking at mealie demo again i see some recipes let you adjust the serving. But others do not.
Edit 2: seems to be related when ingredients aren’t parsed
AdventureLog is pretty cool. Pairs with Immich nicely too.
Paperless NGX is awesome. Of course Immich. I also really like Firefly-iii and Home Assistant.
CalDAV calendar/tasks server s.a. Radicale (with Cfait as a tasks manager/client)
Examples of the type of service I’m looking at: a media server, photos app (to replace Google Photos), game servers, recipe management, home automation… What other things do you know about that are fun/interesting/useful?
I use:
- Immich for photo hosting
- Jellyfin and navidrome for media (video and audio)
- Calibre and calibre-web for ebooks
- Minecraft server
- Mealie for recipes.
- Home assistant for automation
- Habitica for habit forming
- And I have fpp for my Christmas lights (the application is xlights, fpp is the server that runs the scripts)
All of these I like.
