A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Among my must-have selfhosting items, in no particular order, I can recommend:
Due to some concerns about Gitea's future I would recommend Forgejo instead. It's a drop-in replacement with less concerning contribution policies and management structure.
What are those concerns? Why is it relevant to self-hosting?
Is it like the rumor that the Lemmy devs are pro-Russia or whatever it was about?
Honestly asking, here. Not trying to start a flame war, just want to know whether to bother to care about this.
Gitea is managed by a for profit which is now offering a hosting service. That alone is already a conflict of interest because one of Giteas core features is the easy self hosting.
Then the contribution guidelines have been made stricter, anyone contributing now has to give up their copyright to the gitea management, meaning they could change the opensource license to a stricter one down the line without requiring community consent.
The concern is that as time passes features will be locked behind a premium tier for self-hosters or the self-hosting itself will be made more difficult in an effort to push their cloud service.
I’ve been using Forgejo for about 6 months now and I’m really impressed with it. Covers all my needs!
What do you use for scanning for paperless?
I've commented elsewhere on this page:
Brother ADS-1700W
Tiny,fast, scans double-sided straight to a network share. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve bought in years, literally.
The printer has a web interface where you set up destinations, and I set up a file path there. Separately, on the printer itself, you can set it up to do one action automatically when it detects material in the auto sheet feeder, and I used that so it auto-scans to PDF/A and saves it on that network share.
Then I have Paperless check that path once a minute. So my workflow is literally, drop the paper in the scanner, and 5 seconds later put it in a box, then a minute later I see it in Paperless. It’s bliss.
You should try PhotoPrism, it's amazing. All great picks BTW. Gittea had GH Actions compatible runners now!
I have tried Photoprism but was not as impressed by it as Immich.
Theres so many. Check out the awesome list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
I think your stategy should be one service at a time. Do everything in docker, and start by tackling a simpler service. For example, you should try paperless-ngx. Absolute game changer. I didnt realize how much managing ny own directory structure sucked until I used this. Then, grow your service list more and more!
This is a fantastic list I've bookmarked, thanks. But I do want to highlight OP's first point where it says:
...they are too confusing because they list too many apps for each category.
Might be a little more beneficial for OP to highlight a couple useful for their use case that are fairly beginner friendly? I'd do it but I'm basically in the same boat as OP right now, lol
I would avoid self-hosting backups at the same location where your devices are currently kept. There is a reason off-site backups are a thing. So many failure causes are shared with devices in the same home, from electrical issues (lightning and technical defects among other things) over water and fire damage to theft.
That being said: backing up to a single, central, local location and then syncing those backups to some offsite location can actually be very efficient (and avoids having to spread the credentials for whatever off-site storage you use to multiple devices).
I should have written "your only backup", obviously it can't hurt to have both.
Syncthing for back ups. Lovely and easy to use.
As long as it's set to keep copies. Else it's just a way to sync accidental file deletions.
I want apps that let me access my data from anywhere
This may sound exaggerated, but paperless-ngx combined with a good network scanner will change your life. All paper mail accessible anywhere and also searchable. Plus, it is much easier to just scan something and drop it in an archive box instead of trying to figure out which folder (banking or taxes or maybe bills?) to file it in AND still remember that decision years later when you need to find it.
Brother ADS-1700W (edit: now that's the exact model)
Tiny,fast, scans double-sided straight to a network share. It's the most amazing thing I've bought in years, literally.
Since I have this exact problem and need... I went looking. By any chance did you mean the Brother ADS 1700W? If I'm going to take recommendations from strangers on the internet, I want to be sure I get it right. =)
Yes! Sorry for giving wrong details. That was from memory, and I am a goldfish...
The printer has a web interface where you set up destinations, and I set up a file path there. Separately, on the printer itself, you can set it up to do one action automatically when it detects material in the auto sheet feeder, and I used that so it auto-scans to PDF/A and saves it on that network share.
Then I have Paperless check that path once a minute. So my workflow is literally, drop the paper in the scanner, and 5 seconds later put it in a box, then a minute later I see it in Paperless. It's bliss.
For the downloading media part:
The *arr stack is what you're looking for + Jellyfin for streaming (Opensource, 100% free, and much better than Plex).
Prowlarr: manage your indexers
Radarr: find/automatically download movies
Sonarr: find/automatically download tv shows
Jellyfin: streaming your media
Look up trashguides for setting up all this stuff, very detailed guides. They are compatible with torrents and Usenet. I like using docker with portainer for easy management and if you use a VPN container you can selectively route these containers through the VPN so your other services that dont require the VPN dont need to route through it.
Jellyfin for streaming (Opensource, 100% free, and much better than Plex).
*Better for your wallet and the privacy, not better in any functional way.
Plex gotten around to av1 transcoding yet?
I have only a few services. I could probably downscale my server.
AdGuard DNS
Tailscale and Zerotier
Open Media Vault
Jellyfin
Uptime Kuma
Graphana / Prometheus
Torrent/seed box
All on Proxmox and mirrored ZFS 2 x 20TB
For backups I use FolderSync and the default backup for windows. Super lazy, but I don't want to be the IT support of the family.
Is there some quick start templates for graphana / Prometheus? I started setting it up and it's extremely configurable, but I feel like I have to hand craft everything.
That's my issue with Prometheus.... I want to have solid monitoring and metrics, but there's so much setup and I feel like I'm just hosing it all up.
My recommendation: host OpenVPN, change the default port and only access your NAS from the internet using your VPN. Also only allow the VPN port on your router firewall.
If this, then I would highly recommend Tailscale or Headscale. Just simplifies this process so much. Tailscale is so darn good, my number one tool of choice.
Yeah definitely a good idea. Routing your mobile traffic through it so your carrier cannot access your traffic and the services you don’t want to share location with can’t snoop as much on you.
I meant more because people generally don't have as much time to spend on IT security as companies, but yeah, it works for privacy as well.
Also, privacy-wise, what do you guys use to keep your home server anonymous/hidden and protected? Is VPN enough? If yes, what VPN do you recommend?
I'm using wireguard but I hear a lot of good things about tailscale.
Tailscale is a mesh VPN. Its a level of abstraction passed a regular VPN, lime wireguard or OpenVPN. Tailscale uses wireguard under the hood.
I saw this cool thing where you could use a Raspberry Pi to access your NAS bios from your PC.
That's PiKVM
I just discovered this and it's awesome, if you're into gaming at all. It's a containerized console emulator suite, and I think it is very well done. https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-emulatorjs
Tailscale will give you encrypted access to all devices everywhere, including iOS. For any hardware that can't run Tailscale, you can use any Tailscale client on the same network to be a subnet router - other Tailscale clients can then access that network via that client. I do this with a Raspberry Pi.
Once you have a mesh network like Tailscale setup, you can use native tools to copy files, etc, because the the mesh network provides the connection.
Checkout Syncthing and Resilio Sync. Both are great sync tools with different features. I use both, but rely primarily on Syncthing since it's much better on memory use on Android. I use Resilio just for its on-demand sync feature.
Syncthing can also run on an Rpi. I'm pretty sure Resilio can too.
I’m 50/50 regarding tailscale; from what I heard, it’s not fully open source.
You can try out Headscale. The self hosted/open source version of it.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CGNAT | Carrier-Grade NAT |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
[Thread #351 for this sub, first seen 14th Dec 2023, 10:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
My personal lists:
Adguard Home Channels WireGuard for remote access (this is the only open firewall port) Firefly-iii (for personal accounting) Nextcloud for files,calendar,and contacts
Adguard Home or pihole is a must. Jellyfin is also pretty cool.
For accessing files from your smartphones, I know there’s Nextcloud; what other foss file management tools are available, especially on the phones?