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!
You must log in or register to comment.
-
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.
-
LanguageTool, for self run grammar/spelling/style checking.
-
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.
I’m interested in which game servers you can host yourself…
Can you give me a few examples or a link to a list?
https://linuxgsm.com/ could interest you!
Here is a list of games they support. Could give you some ideas: https://linuxgsm.com/servers/
Parties, dinners, other events.
Orgies.
key party
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.
You have to show me that truck, how you got out of your apartment while remaining in the hole. That’s some Goyo Satori stuff right there.
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.
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.
Speakr looks amazing! Thanks
Don’t know about stalwart but I can personally recommend mailcow
I used Mailcow for a while before switching to Stalwart out of curiosity. Stalwart was a bit easier to deploy and feels more polished than Mailcow, but they both get the job done.
Here is my list:
- Open WebUI to have browser access to ollama
- AUTOMATIC1111 Stable Diffusion Web UI to generate images
- HomeAssistant to automate my home
- Immich to backup pictures from family phones and computers and make them accessible like Google Photos
- PeerTube to store and make accessible family videos
- PieFed to access the threadyverse
- Mastodon to do microblogging
- Uptime Kuma to check that all my services are up and running
- Synapse Matrix Server for Text, Video and audio chats with family and friends
- Syncthing to share files
FYI, A1111 is obsolete. The diffusers or comfy-based backends are way faster, richer, less buggy and support newer things.
I’d recommend UIs that support SVDQuant, in particular.
Could you give me a link to one of them?
Thanks a lot, I’ll check it out!
+1 for Home Assistant, though the Docker implementation doesn’t allow add-ons. That may be fine at first, but a lot of the more complicated setup requires add-ons. For me, it was worth it to just go ahead and grab an HA Green to run my HA stuff.
Yeah, I’m still running on my raspberry pi for that reason, and for my parents we also bought a HA green.
Or just a VM running Home Assistant OS. Works great for me in ProxMox.
An open tor exit node, a proxy to a pedopornographic website, a guide to mass shootings, a wiki on how to get untraced firearms, or a Minecraft server
spoiler
/s obviously
It would certainly be exciting to host these…
😏
But on a more serious note, hosting things like StirlingPDF, Nextcloud, Lufi (for encrypted file uploads), or even a mailcow instance is nice
CalDAV calendar/tasks server s.a. Radicale (with Cfait as a tasks manager/client)
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
Maybe an IRC server/bouncer
Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.
My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.
It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)
https://docspell.org/ for organizing your documents using machine learning.
RSSHub. Being able to get all my updates in one place changed how I view the internet for the better.
Adguard Home, with domain pointed to it and using it as Private DNS on Android. No more ads anywhere!
