Docker

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. ...

Once a media library and a media server are both sorted out, the next question most data hoarders hit is how everything actually gets into the library in the first place. Doing it by hand, manually searching, downloading, renaming, and moving files into the folder structure your media server expects, works fine at a few dozen items. It falls apart well before a few hundred. The *arr stack (Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, and a handful of siblings) is the standard homelab answer: a set of small, single-purpose applications that watch for content you want, find it, grab it, rename it, and drop it into your library automatically. ...

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. ...