Free and Open Source Software

• Caddy - Reverse proxy
• Owncast - Twitch alternative
• Jellyfin - Home video streaming application
• Joplin - Note taking app that syncs
• Syncthing - syncs files from my LineageOS (Android) phones to PC
• PiHole - AD blocker
• Minetest - open source voxel game engine (basically Minecraft)
• Veloren - open source adventure game
• Invidious - frontend for Youtube
• Libreddit - frontend for Reddit (about to stop working)
• Proxitok - frontend for TikTok
• Nitter - frontend for Twitter
• Rimgo - frontend for Imgur
• Libremdb - frontend for IMDB

Edit: Fixed PiHole from saying "VPN" blocker to "AD" :-D

The piece of string is very long!

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

You may need to work backwards, identify a service as a need and then figure out which software to run.

Here are some I find really useful:

• Jellyfin (media interface)
• paperless-ng (document store with OCR, tagging, search, etc.)
• Miniflux (RSS reader)

• dokuwiki
• draw.io
• gitea
• woodpecker (ci/cd)
• minio
• postgres
• freshrss (rss server and reader)
• firefly3 (finance / budgets / expenses)
• calibre
• Pi-hole (primary on a pi, secondary on docker host)

[email protected]
https://lemmy.ml/c/selfhost

(still don't know how to link communitys here)

For a real hands off approach take a look at Yunohost or CapRover. Both are very easy installs and will give you a gui to manage your applications and other self-hosted services. It's a great way to dip your toes in. The only difference is that with yunohost, they bundle most of the self-hosted services with their own local-sso implementation, so you only need one login for all your services. This is nice if you want a set it and forget it solution. With CapRover, you basically just have a nice gui to manipulate docker installs, so if you find it a bit too restricting, you could just manipulate the docker installs yourself via command line.

Both are great entry points!

EDIT: Honorable mention of DietPi !

One of my most used softwares on my server is calibre and calibre-web. It allows me to self host my own book server with a very nice looking front end

From the things I use:

• Uptime Kuna, for monitoring the availability of websites/services
• Gitea, for hosting code
• PicoShare, for sharing files
• Maddy, for email

Here are a few I like:

• Jellyfin - a media server software that allows you to organize and stream your personal media collection.
• NextCloud - a self-hosted file sync and sharing platform. Not as good as Google Drive (of course), but it can do the job.
• Bitwarden (with a Rust-written alternative named [vaultwarden] (https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden)) - a password manager for storing and autofilling login credentials.
• Matrix - an open network for secure, decentralized communication. WhatsApp, but in the Fediverse.
• PiHole - a DNS sinkhole that blocks ads and other unwanted content.
• Mycroft - an open-source voice assistant. You can make your own Google Home with it.
• OctoPrint - web interface that allows you to control 3D printers. Pretty handy if you have one!
• Gitea - a lightweight self-hostable GitHub
• Home Assistant - an open-source home automation platform. Can integrate a lot of other things in your house.
• The X-arr initiative - a collection of tools for managing and organizing media libraries. Pretty good if you deploy your own media server:
  • Sonarr - Select TV shows and it will automatically download episodes for you.
  • Radarr -> movies
  • Lidarr -> music

Jellyfin is a great FOSS alternative to Plex for TV/Movie playback.

These are the ones I use most actively, on my FreedomBox:

• bepasty for moving around or sharing temporary files
• Quassel for staying connected to IRC servers
• Radicale for synchronizing my calendar and tasks.
• Syncthing for files I want to have available between my laptop, desktop, phone.
• Tiny Tiny RSS for following blogs.

• Portainer server and agent for monitoring all docker hosts in one place
• Traefik as reverse proxy
• Dashy (complex) and Homarr (simpler) as dashboards
• Gluetun for VPN access for containers and proxy for everyone on the network
• Radarr/Sonarr for managing Movies and TV shows
• Navidrome for music
• Audiobookshelf for audiobooks
• Transmission/qbittorrent/rtorrent/deluge as torrent clients
• Pinhole for DNS
• Technitium for more advanced DNS and DHCP (might replace all piholes with this or blocky in the future)
• Plex/Jellyfin for media streaming
• JellyfinVue - awesome frontend to jellyfin
• Bazarr - for subtitles

I really like Memos. It's a micro blogging site that is minimal, but has a lot of neat features. I'm using it as a replacement for DayOne's journal app.

And I'll second Veloren. My kids and I are having a blast playing.

Miniflux as an RSS reader

You may be way ahead of me on this, but I highly recommend using docker for this endeavor(or podman), as it really allows you to try a lot out without making a mess of your system.

I run pihole, syncthing, and gitea locally(among less interesting things.)

Nextcloud, Bitwarden (vaultwarden is the name of the OSS server), Adguard Home / Pihole and Paperless-NGX might be some things which can have a pretty big impact in your daily life.

I have two instances of BookStack. A public-facing one for bird stuff, and one for home stuff. I also self-host an instance of Plausible Analytics as a privacy-respecting alternative to Google Analytics.

Personally, as well as NextCloud, I'd host instances of LibreX, CloudTube, PiHole, Gitea, XMPP, and CryptPad.

If it's fun you're after, though, why not try hosting a Minecraft server? And how about XMPP or Matrix, to keep in touch with friends?

pihole/adblock monero node/support monero network p2pool/mining pool for monero wireguard/vpn Tor relay, i have thought of using an old pc to support Tor

Home Assistant! You can host it inside a VM.

I've got a pretty booring setup compared to most 🤣. Ubuntu Server running the following in docker,

• Plex
• Audiobookshelf
• Komga

Audiobookshelf has come a really long way. The version out now is heaps and bounds better than what it was 1 year ago.

This reminds me that I need to learn how to use SSH so I can put files on a server.

I have been doing everything the hardway, but I have a few capable older computers I want to put to work.

Self-hosting is going to be my new hobby, I know it.

On my 2 raspberry pi's I am running Pihole, Pivpn, Syncthing, Photoprism, Unify controller, Heimdall (webpage that has all my servers....locally accessible, or non local via wireguard connection via pivpn) Might be more can't remember! Prob more from other suggestions on here over next few days 😂

Syncthing to replace Google drive and Photoprism for Photos. Both have a great functionality and run well on my 12yrs old home server with 2gb of ram.

conduit is a lightweight Matrix homeserver. If you tried running synapse and found it to be an utter mess, conduit is much better!

mpd is a music server daemon with many clients. It scans your music (either stored locally or on a network) and creates a database (either stored locally or accessed from another mpd server on the network).

minidlna is a ~~DLNA~~ReadyMedia server which is a plug and play media server. Many hardware devices (e.g. AVRs) which don't support anything else do support DLNA, so you can e.g. serve music or video directly to your AVR instead of needing a set top box like an Apple TV or Roku.

If you have a problem with collecting machines like I do, set up DNS with dnsmasq. It's pretty easy to get started, all you need to do is write your /etc/hosts file (and, likely, disable the DHCP server). Additionally, if you have a problem with collecting machines like I do, invest in some kind of config management so it's easy to handle all the different things you're running.

Also, if you want to actually learn, I would strongly recommend against using Docker containers for everything. Besides being stuck with what the developers prefer, all the work of installing things is already done. Build things from source (optional), configure all the pieces yourself, work out all the dependencies and actually learn how things work. That's the fun, at least in my opinion. That's why I have yet another SBC with no OS to fiddle with this weekend: I'm looking to migrate from OpenWRT to real Linux so I can do everything myself instead of relying on OpenWRT's scripts.