I’m already hosting pihole, but i know there’s so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!
Edit: Thanks all! I’ve got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!
For me it’s 100% Nextcloud. It was a pain to get working at first (and I’m dreading the day it breaks, if that happens). But it is so much more than just a self-hosted Dropbox solution:
- Maps
- Calendar
- Markdown editor (I’m using this to try and replace Google Drive for collaborative document editing with my friends; most of what we need can be achieved with Markdown formatting)
- I haven’t tried it but there is a Talk plugin that allows for video conferencing in browser;
- a bunch of other stuff I’ve never played with like mind maps, PDF conversion, music player, etc.
I had a lot of trouble setting up nextcloud in the past but if you go with the Docker method, it’s really easy.
Carnet to replace google keep notes
Is that a nextcloud plugin?
It’s a nextcloud app: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/carnet
and then there’s an android app for your phone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spisoft.quicknote
Absolutely this. Nextcloud brings so much stuff to the table, it’s just awesome.
If you wanna replace google docs the onlyoffice nextcloud integration is excellent
Nextcloud is the Wordpress of cloud storage. You can customize it to do literally everything. You can even write your own plugin if necessary. But unlike Wordpress, the default setup is quite locked down (you can’t just drop php files somewhere and have it accessible to reduce security risk) and you’ll actually have to follow certain formats and standards when writing a plugin, unlike the free-for-all every-man-for-himself nature of wordpress plugin development.
It’s a lot of pain to set up, but Nextcloud with OnlyOffice is just great for editing documents collaboratively and in realtime on the web. Actually one of the things that works better than O365’s web editors.
The problem with OnlyOffice is that it doesn’t allow for editing from Android, because then you’ll have to pay, which is why I switched to Collabora Office.
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
Yeah, I’ve also found that issue a while ago. Though I don’t use the editor on Android anyways, so not an issue for me.
I had trouble setting up Collabora Office, but maybe I should revisit that.Before you set up Collabora, you should know that the rendering is done server-side and not client-side. This provides really good synchronization, as the clients will receive the changes simultaneously, but it also results into slower performance, because the server has to do the rendering, instead of the clients.
Why dont you use NC app on phone and then also onlyoffice app that opens your files? Browser is slower anyway
nice wiki!
Thanks!
It’s mostly a recolored version of the Learn2 theme for Grav plus various plugins and small customizations.
Ive run NC in one way or another for years now, and switching to a docker-compose stack was an absolute gamechanger for upgrades and break fix ease.
Yes, Nextcloud. It’s not perfect, but it has made my life easier for the last few years
My experience has been that Nextcloud can do 1000 different things, and it sucks at all of them.
I tried setting up nextcloud. Just ended up creating a samba share instead.
I’m not getting Microsoft Office or Apple quality mail clients, or word editors, but the fact that it’s always available to me is enough to make the trade off worth it. YMMV
That’s a little harsh but I definitely agree it doesn’t tend to offer a better or equal alternative to any free options available. You’re giving up a certain level of ease of use.
Running a Tor exit node could certainly be life changing. Not sure in a good way, guess it depends which country you live in.
I was thinking about doing this but you can be a suspect on a criminal case if Tor is relaying ilegall activities.
Therefore the “life changing” aspect of it
Also worth noting, you don’t have to run an exit node. And there is also the alternative to run a bridge or just snowflake.
I did that for a while to try and learn about filtering malicious traffic from the network. Doing that long term would definetly change my life, but very much not in a good way. It’s a endless whack-a-mole game and the winning prize is that your ISP doesn’t give you a call weekly.
It took couple of weeks until the ISP first called and told me that I have malicious traffic coming from my IP. I explained the situation and their representative was very understanding and handled the thing as well as he ever could. I tried to adjust filters, blocklists and all the jazz which was pretty much a full time job already and I still couldn’t make it work on a sufficient level. I got another couple of calls from ISP (again, handled spectaculary considering I was pushing several hundreds Mbps dirty traffic out in the wild) and eventually they just plainly said that they’re forced to kill my connection if situation doesn’t improve. I ran a node without exit for a while but as that’s not a interesting thing to run I eventually shut it down to free resources for more interesting things.
If you have the time and knowledege to do that, I really encourage that, but for me it was too much to keep in the network while trying to maintain some sanity on my everyday life. I firmly believe that my goal of filtering malicious traffic out and keeping an exit node runnig is achievable goal, I just don’t have enough knowledge nor time to gain enough of it to keep exit node running.
And of course there’s legal issues as well and severity of them heavily depends on where you’re living, so really do your homework before doing anything like that.
Also worth noting, you don’t have to run an exit node. And there is also the alternative to run a bridge or just snowflake.
Home Assistant. It’s a rabbit hole, but it’s great. I’ve got motion enabled lights, thermostats for “dumb” heaters, and I track device usage (tablet, xbox) of my kids.
And it’s so nice having zero dependence on the cloud. If the internet drops out, everything still works, including the mobile app.
Not necessarily, I have devices that are cloud dependent. Locally in NZ there aren’t a lot of options, all smart plugs are cloud dependent. Also things like weather integrations will stop working.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Look for z-wave or zigbee plugs. You’ll need to buy a hub, but unless NZ has banned the protocol, it should get you smart switches, outlets, thermostats and more.
Yeah, I’ve recently bought a HA SkyConnect & some plugs from AliExpress and they work well. Whenever I’ll be in Australia I’ll get some Ikea stuff too. Locally the only Zigbee option is Hue which I find too expensive.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
It’s up to you to make it cloudless, but Home Assistant is the only solution I know of out there that even allows this possibility. I refuse to use anything in my home that requires a third party app or cloud connection (aside from initial pairing so I can flash it with ESPHome or some other local-only firmware). Admittedly it complicates things, but the payoff is so worth it.
Yeah you are right, think all other alternatives require the cloud. I’ve just started with HA so I’m still pretty new to it. I’ve found some good Zigbee plugs on Aliexpress that pair well with ZHA. Over time I can replace the un-flashable cloud based smart plugs from TP Link and Brilliant.
I use Home Assistant as well, but Apple HomeKit (and the new Matter protocol) can also be cloudless I think.
Yup, HomeKit can 100% work without internet. It’s a requirement of being HomeKit certified. I block internet access to all my HomeKit devices and they work just fine.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
There should be plenty of zigbee stuff in the market, right? Ikea and Phillips stuff are mostly zigbee and can work with homeassistant + zigbee dongle (zha). Some tuya switch and smart plugs are zigbee too and can pair directly to homeassistant + zha without using a cloud account.
Locally in NZ we only have Hue which is very expensive. Aliexpress has options but is a bit hit and miss quality.
If you can buy stuff from aliexpress, then look for tuya devices with explicit zigbee support as they usually can work with ZHA. Avoid tuya wifi devices if you can.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Theres plenty of Tasmota based plugs out there. Cloudfree.shop would probably ship to you.
Unfortunately not. I mostly get my stuff from Aliexpress; I’ve found some good Zigbee plugs there.
New Zealand is awesome, but not if you want to have many online shopping options :)
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Swede here. You need Ikea.
Vaultwarden is pretty game changing. No more reusing passwords and they aren’t in the cloud.
This is a rare one for which i wouldnt bother self hosting; i trust the centralized server provider, i can take an offline backup of my passwords and it only costs $10. And im the sort to run my own email server because i don’t trust the cloud providers.
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Why though? Just host it in your private network and use a VPN for occasional syncing.
I second your opinion about not selfhosting Bitwarden. About email, have a look at Proton mail. All the emails are encrypted in the server and are decripted client side with your password only when you open them.
Vaultwarden is super easy. I’ve not had a single problem with it and I’ve been running it for a couple years.
I second this, bonus points if you get a domain through Cloudflare and use their tunnel service to access shrike away from home!
This is a great one and to add it also allows for secure notes, 2FA and sending files securely.
yeah, password manager for me. love it. I am looking at using the home assistant addon to manage it now, it may make life a little easier.
Honestly Plex/Emby/Jellyfin whichever you prefer is a gamechanger because if you have a large library of content then it just cuts the cord from the subscription services.
I’ve always been happy to pay for them until I went on holiday last January and realised that none of my services were working due to going to a country that was out of the way and the only way to access them was to use a VPN.
So having my own Netflix is a great thing.
Tailscale while doing the above is also really cool
Other than Disney stuff, you can’t really guarantee on your kids favorite show or movie always being available on a streaming service you’re already paying for. Jellyfin has been great for those moments. Used to use Plex, and it’s very good software, but I got tired of the non-free aspects. Made me feel like I was subscribing to one more streaming service.
But also kind of with Disney stuff, too
Probably an ignorant question but the content you use is pirated right? Should I wonder about legal issues since I would keep it at home and connected to Internet? Protected of course I just don’t see too deep into the issue
If you don’t explicitly set a DNS to allow access from outside the local network, all your stuff is private and confined within your local network. As it is with all, let’s say, wifi stuff that goes on in your home.
Edit. What @notorious said
I think you mean explicitly open the port on your router, but even then that’s not true. Plex by default will proxy your traffic so that even closed off servers can be reached. It is pretty easy to disable remote access in the server settings though.
Yep. 100% agree. I have a 175TB server. Sure it was expensive to set up initially, but I have all shows and movies I want, always. From all the different services I would have to subscribe to, I imagine I have recovered my initial outlay and I never have to worry about media being removed from the service or it going out of business.
I have things that aren’t even available if I wanted to subscribe. Best thing you can do for yourself.
No commercials, always high quality. Available anywhere, at any time.
I really hope you have that backed up
He/she probably has all his/her movies backed up in the internet ;)
It just takes a really long time to restore from those backups. And weirdly, they’re scattered all over the place…
Depends on your source and connection but I managed to recover 8tb of movies in a couple weeks.
I have a duplicate server off site that I back it up to
Is it useful without piracy though? It would still be expensive to buy all that media? And usually you can’t even download movies etc that you buy online. Am I missing something?
Quite a bit of what I have on my Jellyfin server is ripped from DVDs and Blu-Rays that I already had.
Makes sense. I didn’t think of copying from disks
Same here, 192tb, but sonarr, radarr, plex, and the source that shall not be named (I respect the 2 rules).
It’s not about outlay, I can watch what I want, when I want, how I want, without anyone tracking, even wrote my own video player interface in python so the mouse buttons handle all the settings.
Completely ruins you for normal media :/
As far as changed your life, there are not too many that i really love, that made a massive difference to how i do things. But there is one:
Paperless_ngx
ALL of my paper work, receipts, transcripts, tax, shares, council rates. Everything goes in there. We no longer have paper lieing everywhere (well, my wife is another matter, still keeps grocery shopping reciepts…). when i get soimething in the mail, i used the paperless app to “scan” it, upload it, then bin the paper.
An actual life change that i didn’t know i needed.
How is your work flow from scanning to paperless? Does it support some kind of upload folder?
i use the app, it is essentially a photo which is resized/shaped to be a rectangle.
Yep, supports upload folder, normal upload in the application and also automatically importing from email based on folder/label
Yeah paperless supports an upload folder. My scanner has an ability to scan to a network drive, so I scan things onto a shared drive on my homelab box, paperless consumes the scanned PDF and places it into the paperless “inbox”.
i dont have a scanner, but do use the email function to get my work payslips.
Cool, that’s really easy. I’ll have to bring that up with my gf. She’s basically hoarding printouts and stuff (she’s a teacher) and this might help her in getting it a bit more organized
Commenting here to save this and also to create engagement.
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I also am creating engagement.
i thoguht you may be a bot as there are 20-odd replies the same, but my guess is you are using an app which is a bit dicky.
can you delete all the repeats?
Tried, app wasn’t letting me delete either… Funny that it was on this specific post.
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did you know that you can save a post, by clicking the star?
also, appreciate the engagement :D
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I also am creating engagement.
Man that was some solid engagement!
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Oh nice, thanks!
Without even opening I had this in mind.
Why is this better for you than using a folder structure with a decent naming convention? I’ve tried to get started a couple times, but I just haven’t managed to get what’s better about it. I know i’m missing something, and I feel like if I knew what it is i’d be more likely to out in the work to transition.
well, there are a few things:
- using the app to take photos (in a scan sort of mode, where it trims it to be at right angles), really quick and easy, no matter where i am.
- remote access - i can view all of my documents where ever i am.
- easy & sophisticated search. I have my documents assigned to people (me, wife, child, etc). I also assigned them to things like payslips, tax, shares, legal documents, education docs, receipts, etc. it also helps to automatically tag them to some degree of accuracy
- Automatic dating, it is quite good at picking out the date of the document, as seperate to the upload date. and it is easily updatable if it is wrong
- OCR - the documents content is searchable!
- Ease of tax time. I have some financial year views that make it really easy for me to do my tax (Australia), and i dont need to go hunting for paper that has faded in the heat and is no longer legible.
- folders - the documents are placed in a folder structure of your choosing. if you change the details in the document meta-data, it will move it to the correct place.
so, whilst a folder structure would work. this is SOOO much easier, and provides much more functionality as it is not just storage. it also has WAF!
That was a really clear explanation, thanks. Decent remote scanning would be nice. I guess I just have to wrap my head around tags for some of the niceties to make sense, though I guess i’d be no worse off if I just used folders if that’s an option as well.
you’re welcome.
I tend to use document types more than tags now. note that there are a number of meta-data fields:
- correspondent
- docuemnt type
- tag
i started with tag, but now mostly use a combination of the doc date, type and correspondent. Then use the search bar for specific documents.
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That looks really cool. At the moment I scan everything with OneDrive, and sync it with my NAS. However, it doesn’t have e.g. OCR features, it’s pretty basic. Will have a look, thanks!
definitely try it out. You can auto-ingest from the scanner folder and it will do all the rest of the sorting for you. I go in every few weeks/months and look at the recent documents to sort and fix up any meta-data/sorting.
Thanks. I’ve set it up and imported all my existing scans. Works great.
awesome. i think that the initial install “just works”, then you can start to tweak it. just make sure you mount actual directories, not docker volumes, otherwise you cannto see the files on the disk.
Thanks for the suggestion! I tried to do that and have the files reside on a mount (on my NAS) but that didn’t work, resulted in a “chmod” error. So, instead I’ve created a shell script that runs every night and creates a backup & copies the resulting zip file to my NAS :)
By the way, when using docker volumes, you can see the actual files as well. In my case (RPI4) they are located here: /var/lib/docker/volumes/paperless_media/_data/documents
good to know! thanks
With the right permissions you can get to them. ( i needed root, well started with root)
Saved for futures reference
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Is it possible for the scans to be stored as files that are readable should paperless crash and I’m not around to get it up and running, or are files stored as weird non-standard file formats?
edit: looks like scans are saved as pdf’s. Thanks for the insight!
The files are stored in a directory and you can define the default path with an environment variable ( file-name-handling ). If you need a more fine graint solution you can also use storage paths and select it on file level ( storage-paths ). I’m using syncthing to sync the folder structure to my other devices.
yeah, and it will order them in a configurable manner, based on dates, tags, people, etc. and as things change in the meta-data of the document, it moves/renames the file to suit.
It creates searchable PDFs, so no weird format locked to paperless-ngx
Thanks for the insight!
Yo this shit is awesome. Going to be setting this up asap.
And if you try paperless and don’t like it, docspell is another great option.
The one that was lifechanging for me is audiobookshelf. I LOVE having full ownership and control over all of my audiobooks, and the ability to enjoy them on any device I choose.
This with anonymouse has been a game changer
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An RSS reader (I use Miniflux), ended up being extremely useful
- Almost every piece of software worth selfhosting has an RSS feed for updates (e.g., every GitHub releases page has an RSS feed). I started selfhosting a good deal more after setting up Miniflux.
- Like omg there is this whole internet out there outside of Reddit/Twitter/etc that does RSS. The vast majority of blogs have RSS (e.g., Wordpress and Substack). I wish I had discovered RSS decades ago, so many websites I’ve forgotten because I would check updates manually and eventually just forget. I even host a personal Nitter instance so I can follow Twitter people in Miniflux.
I should get back into RSS. I used to follow a ton of web comics way back in the day, but once google RSS shut down I never picked it back up. I’ll look into Miniflux, thanks.
PiHole!
One of the easiest installer I’ve ever seen. Significantly less ads to be shown especially one on non-browser.
This was my gateway into the selfhosting world. I don’t think I would’ve kept going if it didn’t make such drastic difference to my browsing experience.
I feel like this one needs to be higher up. It so immediately and instantly changes your browsing experience (especially on a phone), that I VPN into my own home network when I’m out just to stay on the PiHole.
Plus, when you get further along in your selfhosting journey you can use the custom DNS to re-route domain names so you never need to leave your network to use your own services.
Any reason to use PiHole over something like Adguard DNS?
For me, at least, is a custom CNAME DNS record. I’ve both internal (point to device directly) and external (via reverse proxy) domains. I use a CNAME record to point the external domain back to the internal one for my local split DNS. Technically it can be applied on Adguard; not as easy as PiHole though.
DNS. It’s always DNS
for better or worse it is, (though I don’t recommend newcomers to boot up a bind server to manage their dns, pihole is probally the best starting point)
Indeed,
dnsmasqwould be much easier to handle than BIND OOTB. I have personally not come across a reason to use BIND for myself, and struggle to see its appeal out of the enterprise/enterprise-like labs, but I don’t really know much about homelabbing eitherIn my (our) case we use bind to run an authoritative resolver for our domain (I am sysadmin for a uni computer society, we have our own (physical) servers)
Well, that is an enterprise-like environment. I’m curious though, why BIND over other DNS implementations? Unless you have very specific requirements I’m sure other DNS solutions would scale too
Bind is well established, got plenty of documentation, is what the previous iteration of the resolver used and on top of all that it works really well with NixOS
Plex
I started with Plex, but I would say it wasn’t until I spun up Nextcloud and got it running that I really would say my life changed. My entire family now has Nextcloud accounts, a family calendar, instant upload of pictures from my phone, all my recipes, and I even have OnlyOffice document server running for editing documents in Nextcloud.
For me, it was a wiki/knowledge base - I’ve had dozens over the years as I’ve tried to find the ‘right’ one, but I’m currently a fan of @bookstack@fosstodon.org. My brain’s not always the most reliable, and so my wiki becomes my ‘external brain’. A lot of people are using things like Obsidian/Notion/etc in the same way.
I’m using obsidian at the moment, but bookstack looks pretty nice. I’ll have to look at that more and see if it would be a good replacement. Can I ask what made bookstack your current driver?
The shelves->books->pages metaphor sort of works for me. It lets me categorise my thoughts in a way that works for me. The lead dev is also really communicative, and it’s been really easy to deploy and run. I’ve been meaning to try and find some time to contribute some hacks to it.
Ideally, I’d love a way to make Bookstack and Obsidian work together…
Ah yeah that makes sense. That organization would be slick, since obsidian feels like it’s all over the place unless you micromanage backlinks. I’ll look some more into it once I wrap up with Homepage. Another post got me started on that lol
The ability to insert flow charts on the go with the draw.io integration built in is amazing for technical documentation.
I might decide to try this for bookmarks. My current problem is I collect all info in various bookmarks. Like open source tools > media/office/bookmarks , royaltyfree > music/pictures/movies, cloud services > storage/VPS/dedicated, temp shares > files/images/video etc etc etc
It ends up with a lot of duplicates because some things fit into multiple categories, I’m at over 3k bookmarks now.
I am curious if it might work well to use bookstack for that instead. Thank you for the idea.May I suggest you benotes for that?
Really happy with it, hast folders, subfolders, tags and search. Still on development, but I like it enough to recommend it every time someone looks for a way to sort their bookmarks
Thanks! I actually did briefly try it as a Keep notes replacement, but decided against it purely because the checklist function does not actually remove the item from the list so it doesn’t work as a shopping list, so the wife would never use it!
I did not consider the potential of using it to store bookmarks. I’ll give it another look. Thanks!
Nextcloud to replace Google drive/docs. Jellyfin or plex for media. The arrs to aquire media (if you have the patience). A blog? A game server to play with friends.
I suggest using docker and docker-compose as it makes everything way easier. It does still take time and it can be frustrating but it is very rewarding.
Crosspost from the duplicate
Do you happen to know if it can be installed on Docker for Windows?
probably, docker is docker, should work independently of the host OS
Thanks, figured as much. My main issue is Docker is annoying on Windows and trying to give it sufficient storage and configuring that with Docker has always been something I just never figure out.
While there is a docker version for windows (server I believe) the last time I checked it could only run windows containers (so basically none). The Linux support never got out of beta. I think now they are just saying use windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) for that.
I have been quite happy with docker on a Linux virtual machine hosted on a windows server (I know not the “normal” way to do it but since I am a windows Server admin at work it worked best for me).
The reason that you cannot run Linux containers on windows by default is that docker is no full fledged virtualization Software it sill uses the kernel of the host system. And a Linux container needs a Linux host system.
Here is a forum thread from the docker forum. You might find some valuable insights there: https://forums.docker.com/t/docker-run-linux-container-in-windows-2019/128196
WSL2 is Linux on a virtual machine. Docker for Windows is running in a VM.
I’m also a weirdo though, I’m using podman instead (and may switch to nerdctl).
Never hears of nerdctl. What is the feature that would make it better than podman for you?
I using and deploying to kubernetes. Nerdctl has a docker API but it’s completely backed by k8s. So, for regular dev I’d just need a k8s cluster and not k8s + something else to build the images and push them into the k8s image repository.
I think there are two “Docker for Windows” one is docker desktop used on windows client OS where you can switch between windows and linux containers. This is the one where it runs a VM for the Linux containers but it’s designed for development and not so much for hosting (at least I have not get it to work for this)
And there is the docker that’s included in Windows Server wich can only run windows containers but those natively and suitable for hosting dotnet web services on scale.
Years ago I selfhosted Nextcloud and found this interaction just as clunky as using google drive. Now I’m just using SFTP which has much less overhead and it integrates beautifully with just about any file manager on Linux. Then again, using it on windows is a pain as far as I know.
Docker is definitely worth the time investment.
If OP wants to go one level deeper: Ansible.
Does ansible make sense for a single server? I like the concept but I don’t know if It makes sense for my purpose.
It makes sense in terms of reproducibility.
Imagine if your server gets compromised, you accidentally break it, or you just want to move to a cheaper provider or a different server. Do you want to have to tweak it all over again, and fix bugs that you figured out how to fix 6 months ago and you don’t remember?
I’d rather have some yaml files that do it for me. And it’s a new skill as well.
That makes sense thanks. I did have trouble figuring out where to start with ansible, do you have any advice about that?
You’re welcome!
I’m still an ansible newbie myself. I first heard about it in this video; https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7p9-m4cimg&pp=ygURV29sZmdhbmcgYW5zaWJsZSA%3D
Then I just figured out by googling and reading the docs / stack exchange.
I started by doing something simple, e.g. write an ansible playbook to update a raspberry pi on my network. Then went from there to launch a small VPS, googling each step that I’d normally do to configure a server, and run them all one after the other on ansible.
I love Wolfgang. His videos are so high quality
Meth labs. That will definitely change anyone’s life.
