Anyone else have it ? The more work I do setting things up like dockers, reverse proxies, single sign on, etc. the more I want to do it. But I’m running out of ideas of things to host that would actually benefit me. But I have that itch where I want more lol.
So far I have the following: (EDIT: added descriptions for those who aren’t familar with all of it. )
- Caddy - use this primarily as a reverse proxy to access my applications via my domain and outside the house
- Nextcloud - mainly using it for cloud storage but also some of their other apps likes decks and tasks as well as contacts and calendar.
- Memos - simple note taking app similar to twitter but personal.
- Miniflux - rss
- Authentik - sso
- Portainer - web view of dockers and status / health
- KitchenOwl - groceries / recipe management
- Actual - zero budgeting (like YNAB)
- Firefly iii - finances management
- Immich - images / iCloud replacement
- Organizr (barely using it. Trying to think of more use cases) - dashboard of all my services
- Speedtest - runs daily speed tests and monitors.
- Plex - host my media library
- Plex_Debrid / rclone - sync real Debrid with plex.
- rsync to backup data to one onsite and one off site location. Automated backups
- Watchtower automated docker updates
- Home Assistant - home automation
- Home bridge - Apple home automation
- Zigbee2mqtt - manage zigbee smart home devices
- Unifi controller - manage my network
I think that’s everything!
Edit: Thanks for the overwhelming responses! I really appreciate everyone with their opinions. First things first I did get borg setup for both my server and my desktop so thats awesome! I am waiting for response from my backup server admin if they can install rdiff-backup for me so I can utilize that as well for my cloud backups.
Going to take a look at a few other of the many suggestions here! More than a few I like!
Monitoring. Try out Prometheus/InfluxDB and Grafana, throw Loki in there too… It’ll keep you busy for a few days to a week at least.
I did all of that and I just use Netdata now.
Decided to just start with Netdata. Looks interesting! Got it running on my server and desktop.
Wise move, all the default alerts that came preconfigured are such a timesaver. I realise what I needed was alerts and not really visualization.
PiHole or AdGuard Home, rutorrent, GitLab.
Yet another note about your list, OP… instead of plain rsync, take a look at rdiff-backup which uses rsync as its backend but it creates incremental backups. Very handy when you made a change a month ago and just noticed a problem! (I actually keep a year’s worth of backups for each of my servers and it’s very easy on the storage space.)
Interesting, I wonder if rsync itself has been updated to include this? The whole point of rdiff-backup was to provide a wrapper for rsync to add this functionality. I dunno, I’ve been using it for many years and it’s never let me down.
Hmm now you got me curious lol. I am newer to this so I could totally be wrong. I told it to make logs so I’ll have to check out the logs. I thought I remember it only backing up new / changed data and then deleting deleted data. I’ll have to look into it more !
There was a point I had a minimum of one service from each category of the awesome-selfhosted repo. I’ve since scaled down to a more minimal approach, but still enjoy looking for new services to try out.
Monitoring is one that’s interesting, graphs can be fun to look at though, so Grafana for that, and it’s fun for family to see, even if they don’t exactly know what it means, lines and charts are pretty.
I have since setup most of my monitoring to only alert if there is something that is unusual or outside of some threshold. Previously I had it alert me when a process or script had finished, however it was too noisy, and instead now it checks to make sure the script succeeded and if it didn’t to alert me.
I would love to self host more but I feel like I don’t have the proper hardware to back it up and I feel like it would take a lot of my free time to manage it properly.
If docker isn’t your thing, you can run multiple virtual machines under KVM and make each service its own separate machine. It really doesn’t take much hardware to get started. If you meant doing system backups, you could always start with building a simple NAS from an old desktop machine, then run a cron job with rdiff-backup to make daily incremental copies of your other servers.
The point is, don’t let old hardware hold you back. I just moved my web servers off of some 20-year-old rack servers earlier this year, it really doesn’t take a lot. Just grab any machine you have laying around and get started. The practice will teach you a lot, and you can then figure out if you need a better system.
I use my old gaming computer, before that I used a raspberry pi. The Pi is sufficient for a lot of things.
Managing the dockers doesn’t take that much effort. Setting things up did take a lot of time, in many small chunks. I never use the :latest tag, and do manual updates. This way things rarely breaks
