A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Also, checkout https://selfh.st/apps/
How safe is it to self host something that you open up to the web? I've been thinking about a keepass self host, but I need it to be accessible from anywhere... I'm just really worried what that does once you open up your local server to the world
- SearxNG (Google Privacy frontend)
SearXNG is more than just a front end for google search, it’s an aggregator, if configured properly can collect results from Bing, Startpage, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, Brave.
Yacy is a web crawler/search engine that IIRC you can self host and use as a SearXNG backend
I run a small setup on a seperate server segment (2nd router behind my main router) so it is on the internet. I run nextcloud, an dendrite and conduit instance (matrix chat-server servers), a mastodon and go-to-social instance (fediverse), bitwarden (password manager), and others.
If there is a service that you do not want to be publically accessable by everybody but you do want to access from everywhere on the internet yourself, check out client-side TLS (https) certificates. The server does is accessable from the internet put only people who have a TLS certificate on their client signed by you can access it. For services that do not require incoming connections from other machines (e.g. nextcloud, bitwarden, ... but no federated services like matrix-chat or the fediverse) that is a very good option to protect your servers.
EDIT:Added Linkding & GameServers
Are you using Kitchenowl for storing recipes? If so, what's your experience with it?
I've tried Tandoor, the common suggestion for recipe management, but I've found it too clunky to add recipes to. I like the concept, but it would take a long time to move all my recipes into the specific format they use, and the web UI does not make things easier.
Worth checking out Mealie, too. Can't say how it compares to Tandoor or Kitchenowl but I've been happy with Mealie for years now.
My experience with the function is limited, but I think it's decent. Markdown support, import from websites etc. If you add the items to the recipe with their amounts and then write them out in the text it automatically give you the amount you need based on the portions specified.
On app.kitchenowl.org you can create a demo-user and household. Within that, you can try the recipe function. Sign up requires a mail-address, but it does not need to be a valid one.
Just from the top of my head:
Edit: I left out some stuff that you or others already mentioned. But here’s the extended list so I can copy/paste this if someone else asks in the future.
Honorable mention:
As someone who works in security, I don't personally recommend self hosting your password manager unless you're planning on never opening it up outside your network or you're willing to be on top of all potential security issues. These are your account credentials we're talking about. You WANT them safe, and the people paid to make sure they stay secure are likely going to do a better job than you.
Firefly III in order to track your expenses
In my experience, firefly is not aimed at household or personal finance. It is very obviously made by and for accountants.
Actual Budget is much more approachable for the normal home user, and very similar to the successful YNAB.
Actual Budget if you're more into envelope budgeting. I came from YNAB and could not get the same workflow out of Firefly as I could YNAB. Actual Budget does provide that.
I do think setting up HTTPS is required for Actual so if you don't have that yet, then Firefly is the way to go.
Hi, I've tried Actual Budget but I've found more interesting in terms of options Firefly, so I've chosen for it :)
You may or may not be a developer, but I would like to vote for Gitea/Forgejo. Should you ever get a grasp of git, a git forge is great for keeping code and even plain text documents recorded. It’s my favorite self-hosted service by far.
It can even operate as an OIDC server, so you can create a single login for all your services (that support OIDC).
I’ll also recommend Grist, an alternative to Google Sheets (and Notion, I believe?). It’s a web interface to spreadsheets that supports Python code as formulas. (I’ve also tried Nocodb, another Notion alternative, and I much prefer Grist.)
I am, indeed, a developer. I might try locally hosting Gitea/Forgejo as an extra backup. I assume you can have multiple “origins” in git, right? That means I can back my repository to both codeberg and server.
Grist seems pretty cool too.
Host a pangolin reverse proxy on a free oracle cloud VPS! It's super nice to redirect online traffic to a LAN resource, that way you can share your home lab with friends and family without having to forward any ports or loosen your security posture.
https://blog.thetechcorner.sk/posts/Connect-to-your-homelab-over-CGNAT-with-tunnels-homelab-2-0/
I also highly recommend this suite of tools for downloading and streaming legal media via torrent because I would never endorse piracy.
I want to add dockge, for making it easy to manage / update your docker containers.
https://github.com/louislam/dockge
Love it. Saves me lots of time.
As you mentioned Immich, Nextcloud and Radicale - don't forget to make regular backups. If you haven't automated them, that's your next project now ;)
How do I set up backups for Immich, Nextcloud, and Radicale? I see lots of different options, I can't pick!
I only host Nextcloud in an old setup (read pure PHP, MariaDB, Apache - no docker, etc.)
That server is set-up to be snapshotted daily. Also there's a script running about 30 min before each snap shot that will also dump the database to disk (as otherwise the snapshot might contain a random state of the database). It's not perfect, but it works - also because everything of this is done in the night, when I do not use the system, so chances are really low, that the snapshot of the disk and the database dump in it are not desynchronized too much.
I do not know what's the best practice for a modern Nextcloud setup with docker is or how to handle the other two...
that seems quite important, I’ll do that then!
And don't think that you can just back up using a file-copy process. These things have databases that also need to be backed up. It's not as simple as it first seems.
Source: been selfhosting for an embarrassingly long time without any backup!
Just a quick add on: not only do and automate backups - do also test them every now and then.
searchxng, libretranslate
It’s searxng but yes. That is a good suggestion.
can I ask what is the advantage of radicale over nextcloud calendar sync?
I hosted radicale first so already had my events sorted out. Wasn’t really bothered moving them again. Also, I like radicale, it’s simple and it works.
Actual Budget is an open-source envelope-style budgeting tool similar to YNAB. It has a self-hostable syncing service so that you can manage your budget across multiple devices.
The reason you might want to do this is that it's probably easier to do full account review sitting at your computer, but you might want to track expenses/receipts on your smartphone while you're away from home.