Over the last few years I’ve been getting more and more into self-hosting. This is the process of running your own cloud-like services yourself, on your own network to gain privacy and control over your data. I feel this is important in this day and age where services are whimsically shut down and users are left with no recourse and every major company is tracking you. When you host it yourself, you control it, no one can shut it down, and no one can track you.

This will be an up-to-date list on my favorite services that I am currently selfhosting, and future additions will be added at the top. For a more comprehensive list of selfhosted services, check out Awesome-Selfhosted.

Baikal - A lightweight CalDAV and CardDAV service allowing you to host your own calendar events, tasks, and contacts. I put this off for a long time, but it feels good to be in control of that data and no longer give it to Google.

AgenDAV - A web calendar that connects to your CalDAV service making it easy to see and manage your calendar from any browser.

PhotoPrism - A very good AI powered photo manager meant for managing large photo collections. It can do automatic facial recognition and image classification. Has a map display, and a lot of other cool features. It’s a good replacement for Google Photos. I’ve also been interested and keeping an eye on another service called Immich but so far have no reason to switch from PhotoPrism. I run this to display my old lady’s late father’s professional image collection which is ~2TB worth of images.

Nginx Proxy Manager - A GUI for setting up proxies. I use it to create subdomains to my selfhosted services. For instance instead of remembering which server and port a service is on, I can just type in airsonic.home.lan and it will forward me to it.

Polaris - Another music service! I really like how it looks and feels, but I find myself still going back to Airsonic because it lacks some features. What holds it back for me is a lack of search functionality in the Android app, and no ability to add radio streams.

OpenBooks - Download eBooks, arr.

searX - Search engine that blocks ads and pulls from multiple providers. It takes a little getting used to retraining yourself on how to actually read results again, I never realized how ingrained Google was before I started using this, but I have had much better luck finding what I’m looking for with it.

RustDesk - Remote control software (like Remote Desktop, Team Viewer, etc.) that works on Windows/MacOS/Linux/Android… very easy to use with some great features planned for later releases.

ulogger - Real-time GPS logger. I haven’t used this much except for a few trial runs, but it seems to work perfectly so far. I’m using it to track motorcycle rides.

AdGuard Home - Blocks DNS requests to known advertisers. All DNS requests on my network run through it. I also am using it to block Amazon from updating my FireSticks.

Dozzle - Easily access logs for your docker containers, great for troubleshooting when things are not working properly.

Healthchecks (video) - A monitor to keep track of the up/down status of all your services and scripts and be notified if they go down or fail to run.

Portainer - A WebUI that allows you to manage docker containers. It’s nice for certain things, but I’m usually managing my docker containers from an SSH session. I mainly use it to update a container that I setup initially with a docker run command, but I’ll likely be setting up Watchtower to do this in the future.

WireGuard (video) - A fast, secure, and reliable VPN that allows me access to all of my services at home when I’m away without having to actually expose those services to the WAN. My phone automatically connects to it as soon as it disconnects from my home WiFi with Tasker. It also allows me to remain secure while connected to unknown WiFi access points on my laptops.

SSH Tunnel - It runs on port 443 and can be used in the same way as the VPN to connect back home and also to bypass firewalls that are doing deep packet inspection and actively blocking VPNs.

Paperless-ng (video) - Instead of having a filing cabinet full of paper documents, I scan them with my phone and upload them, or download the pdf manual of the product and upload it. Paperless-ng allows you to tag the scans, add descriptions, dates, and more. It also has OCR which means that you can run text searches on all your scans. So if you upload a bill from Some Company, LLC you can just search for “Some Company” and it will list all the documents that have those words in them, or your motorcycle battery died under warranty, just search for “battery” and find the receipt for it. I’ve been scanning receipts, manuals, and anything else I feel I might need later.

Homer dashboard (video) - A simple dashboard for quick and convenient access to all my services. Another one that really intrigues me is Dashy, and I’ll be spinning it up soon to try it out.

nginx - It’s a load balancer and web server. I use it to serve up the Homer dashboard and Dokuwiki services, although I could just as easily run them in Docker containers too.

DokuWiki (video) - It’s a way to organize information, I started with Bookstack but now prefer this. I use it to keep track of how I solve problems on a computer or how I set something up on a server. I also similarly keep track of vehicle maintenance and upgrades and other projects with it.

Nextcloud (video) - In simplest terms I would say it’s a Google Drive and Evernote replacement, but it can do much more than I can describe here through it’s plugin interface. I strictly use it to backup pictures/videos/documents from my phone automatically. (I’ve replaced NextCloud with File Browser and Syncthing.)

AirSonic (video) - Allows me to stream my entire music collection and have access to it everywhere I go. Think of it like running your own Spotify service.

Wallabag - Archives web pages. Allows for tagging and searching your entire archive to easily find the information or page you want to see. I’ve found it doesn’t work for every page the way I would like, but it is the best option I’ve found so far. I use this in combination along with SingleFile when Wallabag doesn’t work but I wish there was a better solution as I’m not completely satisfied with it.

Pihole - Blocks DNS requests to known advertisers. I set non-rooted android devices to use this for DNS so that I can still block ads on them. (I’ve replaced PiHole with AdGuard Home. I prefer the UI, it has a few more features, and it uses less system resources.)

Minimalist Web Notepad - A simple notepad that can be opened from any browser. It saves/opens files based on the URL and it’s very fast, I use it for quick notes that don’t need to go into DokuWiki. There is also a fork of this with a few more features like a note list, password protection, and more.

The Lounge - It’s an IRC client, I like both this one and quassel, but this is what I am currently using.

Lidarr - Makes managing and downloading your music collection easier. It lists all the albums of artists you add and then allows you to download them by finding it on multiple sources (torrent trackers and on usenet) and places the download in the correct folder automatically. If something is not available on the trackers or usenet it will keep checking for it and when it becomes available then it will download it.

Sonarr (video) - This does basically the same thing as Lidarr but for TV shows. I used to use RSS feeds in a torrent client but have recently switched to doing it this way.

Jackett - This allows you to combine and manage multiple torrent trackers that services like Sonarr and Lidarr will query.

SABnzbd - A usenet downloader that can be used in services like Sonarr and Lidarr to download from usenets.

Deluge - My favorite torrent client whether it be on desktop or server. I switched to Deluge because qBittorrent was using more RAM than it should have been using.

Syncthing - Makes backing up my phone to my NAS extremely easy and also allows me to keep files synced between different devices like laptops and phones.

File Browser - A web based file manager for accessing files on the NAS through a browser. Because this has such a generic name, I’m going to provide the link for the project, File Browser.

Pinry - A selfhosted version of Pinterest, works great as an idea board for projects.