this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Today I set up my old laptop as a Debian server, hosting Immich (for photos), Nextcloud (for files), and Radicale (for calendar). It was surprisingly easy to do so after looking at the documentation and watching a couple videos online! Tomorrow I might try hosting something like Linkwarden or Karakeep.

What else should I self-host, aside from HA (I don’t have a smart home), Calibre (physical books are my jam), and Jellyfin (I don’t watch too many movies + don’t have a significant DVD/Blu-ray collection)?

I would like to keep my laptop confined to my local network since I don’t trust it to be secure enough against the internet.

edit: I forgot, I’m also hosting Tailscale so I can access my local network remotely!

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[–] perishthethought@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I want to add dockge, for making it easy to manage / update your docker containers.

https://github.com/louislam/dockge

Love it. Saves me lots of time.

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[–] a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

Paperless-ngx - it allows you to upload important documents like receipts, contracts, etc. and uses OCR so you can search them

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Run a RocketChat server for me so I don't have to pay $8/mo anymore

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[–] lemonuri@infosec.pub 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Snikket is easy to host in a docker container. You would have your own internet messenger for friends and family. Snikket is based on the xmpp protocol thats been around for 20 years, is tried and tested and very lightweight and does take very few resources on your server. things like Nintendo's messenger and WhatsApp are xmpp based).

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[–] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm absolutely loving immich. Definitely check it out. Via Docker compise is a breeze.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I’m already hosting Immich, I feel it was the most painless to set up out of the three. There was a weird error with python modules with radicale and Nextcloud was a bit more complex to set up, but they were all relatively easy to get started with.

I particularly like Immich’s mobile app. I just clicked a few buttons and BOOM all my photos are backed up (you can even change what albums to include and exclude, and duplicates are automatically removed e.g. if you have the same photo in multiple albums)

[–] cron@feddit.org 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Just as a side node, make sure to backup your immich / nextcloud services too.

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[–] hitmyspot@aussie.zone 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I personally prefer keepass and really don’t trust my server to be secure enough with all my passwords…

[–] hitmyspot@aussie.zone 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Haha, I don't trust my own server either, but I don't trust anyone elses even more.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago

hence keepass :D

might set up syncthing too so I can sync my passwords p2p...

[–] BroBot9000@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I’m looking to get started with self hosting too. Could you share the links you used to get yourself set up?

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago

Awesome SelfHosted is a great place to start looking: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago

Radicale’s official documentation didn’t help me much, so I followed some youtube video (by “Awesome Open Source”) where you use a docker image instead of a python venv + pip install.

For Immich, official docs were fantastic!

For Nextcloud, I followed Learn Linux TV’s “How to Set Up Nextcloud on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS” (though I used Debian, not Ubuntu)

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[–] BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I've been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.

First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you've not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don't want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.

I also recommend Pihole - it's an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It's really improved my experience on all my devices.

Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.

Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.

Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.

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[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

What else should I self-host, aside from HA (I don’t have a smart home), Calibre (physical books are my jam), and Jellyfin (I don’t watch too many movies + don’t have a significant DVD/Blu-ray collection)?

You sound kind of like me, but physical books are not my jam. I host a lot of things I use all the time. The most used app I selfhost is SearxNG. When you get it all set up, in your browser settings you can substitute DDG for your private SearxNG instance.

I host Obsidian which is a note taking app. It houses all my compose files, step by step tuts I've written to myself, interesting code snippets, etc. There are several encryption plugins for Obsidian that allow you to encrypt the document itself to keep it away from nosy people.

I host Readeck and Karakeep. These are bookmark type apps. I use Readeck for 'read it later' type articles I find are interesting. Karakeep I use for data preservation. Both can be used for both bookmarks and data preservation, I just keep 'em separated.

I host a lot more but that might get the juices flowing as it were.

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[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Why Radicale when you have a caldav-capable calendar in NC?

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 day ago

I hosted Radicale first, so already had my calendar events and such set.

[–] yaroto98@lemmy.org 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Home Assistant? Maybe a homepage like Heimdall or some other dashboard? Maybe Uptime Kuma to notify you when your services go down? Definately a pihole or adguard home. Biggest quality of life improvement. It's the biggest thing my wife notices and approves of. She audibly groans in disgust when she leaves the LAN on her cellphone and sees all the ads and garbage that had previously been blocked. My pihole dashboard show 70% of the requests are blocked on my LAN. And everything works great.

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[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 5 points 2 days ago

Syncthing for files syncing, to replace stuff like OneDrive, Dropbox etc.

I use to sync files between my NAS, laptop, Steam Deck and phone, each with different dirs based on what I need synced there.

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Straying away from utilities, games are always fun to host. I got started with self hosting by hosting a minecraft server, but there are plenty of options.

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[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 days ago (5 children)

I host a number of alternate frontends. Alexandrite for Lemmy, Redlib for Reddit, Invidious for Youtube. And then I have the Privacy Redirect extension make any links to Reddit or Youtube go to my local.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago

Ah, that seems pretty cool :D

[–] Mordikan@kbin.earth 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Is Invidious still working? After the latest round of API patches on Youtube's end, I didn't think it was.

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[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 4 points 2 days ago

If you're just looking for something to chew up CPU cycles and don't know what to host, consider something like BOINC where you're "self-hosting" (extremely loose term) scientific research, like cancer, new drugs, etc.

[–] SilentKnightOwl@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 days ago

Karakeep is fantastic, I know you mentioned it already, but I just wanted to shout it out. The AI tagging is a little gimmicky and pointless, but it's super nice to have a really searchable, automatically organized bookmark manager.

I look at what services I use and see if I can replace any of them w/ a self-hosted solution. Rinse and repeat.

Looking for more stuff to host will just overcomplicate things. I instead try to look for ways to consolidate services down.

[–] Cyberflunk@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Ipfs gateway, Tor gateway

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