54 articles tagged "guide"
Your public server is being probed right now. The hardening checklist I run on every machine, SSH keys and firewalls and CrowdSec and non-root containers, in the order I apply it, before something else finds the gap first.
A records, CNAMEs, wildcards, MX, TTL and split DNS explained the way I needed them explained, before a domain panel stopped looking like a cockpit and started looking like the most powerful page on the internet.
Joplin keeps your notes as plain markdown files that sync across devices without a server in the middle. Pair it with Syncthing and a decade of notes becomes a folder you own, encrypted, searchable and immune to shutdowns.
Infisical is an open-source secrets manager you can self-host. Centralized secrets with environments, versioning, audit logs and a CLI that injects them at runtime, so .env files stop living on your disk and in your git history.
Pangolin is a self-hosted, identity-aware tunneled reverse proxy. Your home server dials out over WireGuard to your own VPS, and you get per-user access control, SSO and browser-based remote access without exposing your network.
Coolify turns any server into your own PaaS. Connect a git repo, push, and it builds and deploys with SSL, previews and rollbacks. Sixty-one thousand stars of Heroku, running on hardware you pay for once.
Buzz is Block's open-source workspace where humans and AI agents work in the same rooms and every message lands as a signed event on a relay you own. I stood one up with Docker Compose behind a Cloudflare tunnel.
Handy is a free, open-source dictation app that transcribes speech locally on your machine with Whisper and NVIDIA Parakeet models. Press a key, speak, and your words land in any text field without ever touching the cloud.
RomM is a self-hosted ROM manager that scans your library, fetches covers and metadata, and plays games in the browser with EmulatorJS. Twelve thousand stars of nostalgia, organized like a real console shelf.
Wallos is a self-hosted subscription tracker that shows every recurring charge in one place, with due-date notifications, multi-currency totals and statistics. Know exactly what your subscriptions cost you each month.
Memos is a lightweight self-hosted note app built for quick capture. Open a box, type a thought, tag it, done. Sixty-two thousand stars of proof that the fastest note app is the one with no friction.
Authentik is a self-hosted identity provider that puts single sign-on, MFA and central user management in front of your whole stack. One strong password and one MFA prompt instead of twenty weak ones.
SearXNG is a self-hosted metasearch engine that queries Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and dozens of others on your behalf, strips the tracking and the ads, and hands you clean results from your own domain.
Healthchecks is a self-hosted dead man's switch for cron jobs and background tasks. Your scripts check in, and when one goes silent you get alerted, because a job that fails quietly is worse than a job that fails loudly.
Watchtower watches your Docker images for new versions, pulls them and restarts containers automatically on a schedule you control. Stop patching twenty containers by hand and let the boring part run itself.
Frigate is a self-hosted NVR with real-time AI object detection. Person, car and animal alerts from your RTSP cameras, event recordings and Home Assistant integration, with no cloud subscription holding your footage hostage.
changedetection.io monitors web pages for changes and pings you when the thing you care about happens. Price drops, restocks, appointment slots and government notices, watched from your own hardware for free.
Actual Budget is a free, local-first envelope budgeting app you can self-host. YNAB's method without the $109 a year, with your financial data living on hardware you own instead of someone else's cloud.
Karakeep is a self-hostable bookmark-everything app with AI tagging, full-text and semantic search, and full-page archival. Save links, notes, images and PDFs on your own hardware, with local models via Ollama.
Audiobookshelf is a self-hosted audiobook and podcast server with progress sync, chapter lookup and auto-downloading podcasts. Your library, your files, no DRM, no subscription holding the keys.
ntfy turns a curl command into a push notification on your phone. Self-host it and every script, server and sensor can talk to you through one tiny Go container, with no push service in the middle.
Paperless-ngx turns your scanner into a searchable archive with OCR, tagging and full-text search on your own hardware, so every receipt and contract is one query away and nobody else hosts your paperwork.
Stirling PDF runs 55+ PDF tools in a browser tab on your own hardware. Merge, split, compress, OCR, sign and redact documents without a single file leaving your network.
Google Analytics was slowing my site down and selling my visitor data. Plausible is privacy-first, lightweight, and self-hosted.
I was subscribed to 50 blogs via email. My inbox was chaos. FreshRSS lets me read them all in one clean interface.
Bitly is fine until they want $40 a month for custom domains and analytics. Shlink does the same thing on my server for free.
I installed Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi. It now blocks ads, trackers, and malware at the network level. Every device in my house is protected.
Tailscale is amazing but depends on their servers. Headscale lets you run the same thing on your own infrastructure.
I had 15 services running and kept forgetting which port was which. Homarr gave me a single page to see everything.
My grandmother's recipes were on handwritten cards. Now they are in a searchable, self-hosted recipe manager I can access from my phone while cooking.
Setting up a mail server is terrifying. You will mess up DNS. You will land in spam folders. And then it will work and you will feel unstoppable.
I stopped editing documents on Google Docs after realizing they train AI on my content. CryptPad is encrypted, collaborative, and self-hosted.
Slack wanted $12/user/month for the privilege of searching our own messages. Mattermost does everything Slack does on our server.
GitHub is great until you want to own your code. Gogs is the lightest Git server ever written and it runs on a Raspberry Pi with 64MB RAM.
Calendly is convenient. But $16 a month for letting people book time on my calendar? I built the same thing with Cal.com for free.
I lost 2TB of data because I thought 'it will be fine.' Then I built a backup strategy that actually works.
My smart home was dependent on the internet. When the ISP went down, my lights stopped working. Home Assistant fixed that.
I got tired of paying OpenAI $20 a month and having my conversations on their servers. Now I run local LLMs on my own hardware.
Our team had documentation scattered everywhere. Google Docs, Notion, Slack messages. BookStack gave us one place to keep everything.
LastPass got breached. Then 1Password raised prices. I built my own password manager with Vaultwarden and it is actually better.
Zapier wanted $74 a month for the plan I needed. n8n does the same thing on my server for free. The math was simple.
I needed my files on all my devices. I did not want to pay for Dropbox or trust Google. Syncthing syncs everything peer-to-peer.
I replaced Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Google Docs with one Docker container. My data, my server, my rules.
Google Photos stopped being free. Then they started scanning my images. I left and built something better with Immich.
I got tired of albums disappearing from Spotify. Navidrome let me take my music back and it sounds better too.
I used to download things manually. Then I automated the entire pipeline and forgot what manual meant.
Netflix raised their prices again. I left and built a better version with Jellyfin. The only regret is not doing it sooner.
I used Docker for two years before I understood networks. Do not be me.
I thought my services were fine. They were not. Here is how Uptime Kuma saved me from finding out the hard way.
You have services running on random ports. You connect by remembering numbers. There is a better way and it takes five minutes.
I used to live in the terminal. Then I installed Portainer and realized I was just doing things the hard way.
I was paying $60/month for cloud VPS. Now everything runs on an ITX PC in my closet — and Cloudflare Tunnel makes it feel like a datacenter.
Take control of your digital life. Learn what self-hosting is, why it matters, and how to run your first service in 30 minutes.
Stop installing things manually. Learn how Docker Compose simplifies self-hosting so you can deploy services in seconds.