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!
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Game servers are always fun! I set up a custom Minecraft modpack and have it set up on my domain. I also run an Arma 3 server, but it’s a hackjob of a self-host solution and I’m ashamed of how it works.
To address your examples directly:
Media server: Jellyfin, along with an *arr stack (Radarr, Sonarr, and qbittorrent and gluetun) to automate everything for you.
Photos app: Immich is your direct Google Photos replacement. Automated uploads, object detection, facial recognition, etc, all ran locally on your machine. Just remember: you still need a proper backup!
Recipe management: Mealie is the best I’ve used. It can import a recipe from almost any website. Very easy to cook with and follow along each step. It also lets you categorize meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), rate your meals, and randomly pick meals for you.
Other things I have going:
Frigate NVR - A couple PoE and wifi cameras set up around the home record everything. Frigate records and timestamps things based on the settings - A person walks up, something loud happens, etc. My only gripe is that there isn’t a good Android app to go with it. I’d like to receive notifications on my phone, too.
MeTube - Rip videos from almost anything. Friend sent you an Instagram video, but you don’t have Instagram? Chuck it into this and it’ll give you the video. Here’s all the websites it supports.
IDK how Frigate handles alerts, but Blue Iris will write an alert to MQTT topic if it matches object recog, and I have an app MQTT Alert that watches that and goes nuts if it comes up. The BI android app is underwhelming in its alerts.
I’d have to figure Frigate has some sort of MQTT capability. I tried using Frigate but it was pretty basic for my needs, so I moved on.
Is there documentation and stuff for an Android app to be built? I might be interested in building one.
https://github.com/sfortis/frigate-viewer
This is the closest thing to an android app, but it just adds a check to see if you’re on your local network or not. Other than that, it’s just a web frontend.
The frigate documentation also has some info about installing it as an app, but either I’m doing it wrong or it’s the equivalent of a bookmark on my homescreen.
Yeah, that’s a progressive web app, not a native Android app. I’ll check it out, I have a few cameras I want to play with.
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
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!
AdventureLog is pretty cool. Pairs with Immich nicely too.
Paperless NGX is awesome. Of course Immich. I also really like Firefly-iii and Home Assistant.
Home Assistant might be of interest.
Additionally, pi hole, Immich, and things based on your hobbies might be fun. I recently started hosting a Grafana service to send my garmin data to since I like seeing my health data. I know you didn’t want grafana, but using a hobby as an example. What are some of your hobbies?
Maybe an IRC server/bouncer
I see these as infrastructure rather than the interesting project itself.
Well, you kind of have to have the infrastructure to make the fun happen. Docker is probably one of the more easy to deploy from the standpoint of someone just standing up a server.
- media server: Navidrome is what I use, but there are a plethora of choices
- photos app: Immich is quite popular, but again there are a list of them
- game servers: There are several that I know of like Doom , Minecraft, iirc there is a Quake server, I think you can integrate Steam. I can’t run games because of a seizure condition, but maybe others can chime in.
- home automation: HomeAssistant, NodeRed, N8N, Ansible, just literally tons of automation
These and thousands of other apps can be deployed via Docker. You don’t have to use docker, you can install on bare metal as well, tho containers make things neat and tidy.
As far as ‘fun’, to me it’s all fun. I selfhost for the utility, privacy, security, and anonymity of it, the educational part of it, and because it’s fun. My version of fun is going to vary widely from yours probably, but I find learning quite fun. Sky’s the limit pretty much.
Weather station, terrestrial/satellite TV DVR (TVHeadend), Git repository (Forgejo for a nice web UI, cgit for a classic UI), DNS resolver.
Your own wiki, and your own social media-type service
I post miscellaneous notes to my social media-type service, and save lists and more organised information (including recipes) to my wiki.
If you have a Nvidia graphics card 1070 and above, then openwebui. You can selfhost your own LLM. AMD is probably supported but haven’t checked.
