Self-Hosted

Somewhere between your third and tenth self-hosted app, running everything by SSHing in and typing docker compose up -d stops being charming and starts being a chore. You forget which directory a stack lives in, you lose track of which containers have image updates waiting, and checking logs means remembering the right docker logs -f incantation for each one. A web UI on top of Docker doesn’t replace knowing the CLI, you still need it for anything that goes wrong, but it turns routine maintenance into a few clicks instead of a few minutes of typing. The three worth actually considering for a homelab are Portainer, Dockge, and Yacht, and they solve different-sized versions of this problem. ...

If you’re running any homelab automation at all, sooner or later you end up wanting a place to put your own code, Ansible playbooks, docker-compose files, a scheduled content pipeline, whatever you’ve cobbled together, that isn’t a public GitHub repo and isn’t subject to GitHub’s own uptime, rate limits, or terms of service. Self-hosting a git server used to mean a lot of manual setup. Now it means picking between a handful of mature, actively developed options that install in minutes. The three worth actually considering are Gitea, Forgejo, and GitLab Community Edition, and they are not equally good fits for the same job. ...

Every other self-hosted app on this site replaces a subscription with something you run yourself. AI is a little different, the frontier cloud models are genuinely ahead of anything you can run on homelab-grade hardware, and pretending otherwise sets you up for disappointment. What self-hosting AI actually buys you is privacy for anything you don’t want leaving your network, zero per-token cost for high-volume low-stakes tasks, and a model that keeps working when your internet doesn’t. Ollama and Open WebUI are the two pieces most homelabbers land on to get there, and they’re worth understanding separately before you stand up either one. ...

Ditching Google Drive or Dropbox is one of the most common reasons people start self-hosting in the first place, and it’s also one of the easiest to get wrong by picking the wrong tool for the job. Nextcloud and Syncthing both get your files off someone else’s server, but they’re built on completely different models, and picking the one that doesn’t match how you actually work is how people end up frustrated and quietly back on Dropbox six months later. Here’s what each one actually is, where they overlap, and how to pick. ...

Most people’s first smart home purchase is a cloud-connected bulb or plug, and most people’s first regret is realizing that bulb stops working the moment the manufacturer’s cloud service has a bad day, changes its app, or shuts down entirely. Home Assistant exists to fix that: a self-hosted automation hub that talks to your devices locally whenever possible, keeps the logic on hardware you control, and doesn’t care if the internet is up. For a homelab operator who already runs Proxmox and a stack of Docker containers, it’s one of the more satisfying things you can add, because it’s the one self-hosted service that actually reaches out and touches physical stuff in your house. ...

A password manager is the one self-hosted app where “good enough” isn’t good enough. Every other app on your stack going down for a night is an inconvenience. Your vault going down, or worse, becoming unrecoverable, is every credential you have locked behind a box you can no longer reach. That raises the bar for how carefully you set this one up compared to, say, a media server or a dashboard. Vaultwarden makes the bar easy to clear, it’s a small, mature, low-resource app, but only if you actually do the hardening and backup steps instead of just running the container and calling it done. ...

At some point every homelab operator wants to reach their stuff from outside the house, checking on a download, pulling up Jellyfin at a friend’s, hitting the Proxmox web UI from a coffee shop. The wrong way to do this is punching holes in your router’s firewall and forwarding ports straight to internal services. The right way is a VPN that puts your remote device on the same private network as your homelab, so nothing is exposed to the internet at all. WireGuard, Tailscale, and ZeroTier are the three tools homelabbers reach for most, and they’re not really three competing options for the same job, they’re two different approaches with WireGuard sitting underneath one of them. ...

Google Photos used to be the easy answer: unlimited storage, decent search, an app that just worked. That deal is gone, storage now counts against your Google One quota, prices have crept up, and the underlying trade was always the same one every free cloud photo service makes: your entire photo library, including the ones you’d rather not have scanned by an ad-tech company’s ML pipeline, lives on someone else’s servers under someone else’s terms. Immich and PhotoPrism are the two projects that have actually closed the gap between “self-hosted” and “something you’d trust with 15 years of family photos.” Picking between them comes down to a few real differences, not just which one has a nicer logo. ...

Browser extensions block ads on the device they’re installed on. A phone that isn’t running one, a smart TV, a game console, a guest’s laptop on your Wi-Fi, none of that gets covered. Network-level DNS blocking fixes that by sitting between every device on your network and the internet, and refusing to resolve requests to known ad and tracker domains before they ever load. It’s one of the easiest wins in self-hosting: low resource cost, immediate and visible results, and it protects every device on the network without touching a single one of them individually. Pi-hole and AdGuard Home are the two dominant tools for doing this yourself, and picking between them comes down to a handful of real differences, not just branding. ...

A Proxmox Backup Server job backs up entire VMs and containers, which covers you if a whole box dies. It does not, by itself, give you a clean, restorable copy of the actual data living inside your self-hosted apps, the Vaultwarden vault, the Paperless-ngx document store, the dozen docker-compose.yaml files and their bind-mounted config directories that took real time to get right. If your backup strategy stops at the hypervisor layer, you’re covered against hardware death but not against the more common failure: a bad update, a fat-fingered docker compose down -v, or a config file you meant to edit and instead overwrote. This is where an app-level backup tool earns its place alongside whatever you’re already doing at the VM/container level. ...