I’m already hosting pihole, but i know there’s so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!
Edit: Thanks all! I’ve got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!
Since no one else has mentioned it, I’ll give a shout out to documentation engine Outline. Definitely on the trickier side to set up (requires three auxiliary services to be configured) but creates great looking docs that share easily, allows for collaboration and is super fast.
This looks pretty cool, but I’m assuming the “audit trail” being limited to enterprise users means I can’t see version history on the free version. I’d consider paying the $4/user/month, but the 100 user minimum kinda kills that option for me. If I’m wrong and “audit trail” means something else, I’d strongly consider spinning up an instance!
Bookstack is also a good one. Haven’t set it up on the home server yet but when I was playing around with it on localhost it was pretty decent for my uses.
For me it’s a HomeAssistant instance. Great product that has some very tangible use cases that can benefit ones household in terms of being able to implement nice automations etc, and also a great hub in that it supports such a broad range of products and services. As an Apple user in particular its one of the great ways to get non HomeKit certified devices working with Siri/Homekit on my other Apple products.
It also makes installing addons a breeze including other products people have mentioned here such as AdGuard Home (as a PiHole alternative) and the like.
A few years ago I’d say it wasn’t for the average Joe, but I think the product has really matured and is much simpler than it used to be. There’s a strong community out there too.
For multimedia I’d say Plex personally, but Jellyfin would be another option. Good way to manage personal media libraries.
I always like the idea of home assistant, but I haven’t figured out a practical automation for my home. Maybe you can share some of your most useful automation?
Ceiling motion sensor above the stairwell leading to second floor that activates hue bulbs in the upstairs hall. Depending on the time of day it turns on for different lengths of times/brightness and at night for ~2 min to red to allow easy travel without upsetting eyes adjusted for darkness.
That and a similar one that we activate via our echos called “Bedtime for babies” that dims all the lights to have our little one start winding down.
Sure. I don’t have many enabled right now but some that I’ve used that are probably useful to others
I have a zigbee smart lock that was relatively cheap but didn’t have a sensor on it to detect if the door is open or closed, just a timer built in. To make the lock smarter so that it won’t attempt to lock if the door is open, I’ve used a $10 aqara sensors to detect if the door is opened or not and then combined those with the door lock to say, trigger a door lock after 5 minutes of the sensory closing, but only if the door isn’t opened again.
Another Aqara sensor automation that I don’t use any more as we moved to a house that has a carport rather than garage, but I used a contact sensor on my ‘dumb’ garage door to detect if the door was open or not. If the garage door was opened, the garage light would go on. Could do this other ways such as with motion sensors etc but unlike a motion sensor this would keep a light on until the door closed.
I have a robotic vacuum that I would automatically turn on when every person left the house. If someone was detected returning within a KM of the home, the robot would then return to the dock so it was out of the way when people got home. I really really loved this automation, but I haven’t used it since having kids 4 years ago as there has inevitably been too many toys etc that the vacuum would pick up now days. If your floor is relatively tidy but, it’s a great way to do a vacuum.
I haven’t explored it yet but Home Assistant pulls in my data from my solar panels and battery. In theory I could probably automate some of my appliances based on power generation or battery charge. Haven’t explored that fully yet however.
Those are some thoughts. Right now I use it mostly to bridge devices that otherwise don’t talk together or integrate with HomeKit. Haven’t played around with the automations for a bit, but meaning to go in and have a play with it more at some point. It’s a product I tinker with for a few weeks then let simmer for months before coming back too.
Where would one find these sensors? And, are they supported by the vendor for a decent amount of time?
Anytime I’ve tried finding door-open sensors in this price range, I can never find brands that seem well known and reputable (thinking of vendor updates), or that won’t take two months to ship to my place. Or is that just the trade off for the price?
Usually grab them on sale. Also a few others from the Aqara family such as climate (humidity and temperature) that you can get cheap. Have a motion sensory from them too that works ok but i don’t currently have in use.
I combine these with a Conbee II and in home assistant I use ZHA (over deConz, which is an option too) to manage connectivity to the sensors. I don’t use the Aqara hub any more as I’d rather run things locally via home assistant than using a third party hub which removes any potential concern around privacy. I’m honestly not sure if these sensors are upgradable or not but they work reasonably enough. Maybe once every 6 months I need to spend 2 minutes reconnecting one but it’s not too common. It helps to have some ZigBee smart power plugs scattered throughout the house, even if you aren’t automating power to things, as they form a mesh network which can make battery powered sensors more reliable.
I picked ZHA over deConz largely in the basis it’s development was linked to home assistant so I figured over time it’d see more development from the home assistant devs.
I aim to use ZigBee where I can over WiFi or Bluetooth devices. Lower power and more responsive in my experience. Also frees up the wifi traffic and the more ZigBee things you add the more reliable the mesh network gets.
Thanks for the great response! Especially about the Conbee II and ZHA pieces. I’m slowly piecing things together for my first wave of home automation, and this will definitely help with the analysis-paralysis I’ll hit along the way!
A catch-all email server. I have a limitless amount of mail addresses going to me and my wife’s mailboxes. When an address gets leaked or start receiving spam I immediately know what company is to blame.
I have a PiHole, my own EdgeRouter that is behind the Verizon router, a UPS, a wired switch, a SiliconDust HD HomeRun to convert my cable to a stream, my Hue controller, my Camera DVR, and a Pi4 hosting network storage.
It all fits neatly in a 6U closet rack. I use the EdgeRouter to host a VPN I can connect into to manage things for the house, and also use it to dial out to a VPN, so I can connect the TVs in the house to a VPN abroad.
I also have a Smart Garden powered by a raspberry pi, connected to a rain barrel, a water pump, some solenoids, and some moisture sensors.
Yes I actually have two of them. My backyard has three outdoor moisture sensors, so it can know if it’s moist enough. It has a drop irrigation system connected to regular plastic pressure for tubing. It has two zones that can be controlled with two solenoids. It also has a 12V pump. All of that is powered by a 12V power supply and controlled by a four zone relay board. Remember to turn the power off to your outdoor sensors so that they don’t destroy themselves when you’re not sensing. You can also add a flow sensor to measure your water consumption.
Hey that sounds amazing, may I ask what moisture sensors you are using?
Edit: also automating sensor power draw sounds like something fun to work on. I’d love to test if having them power on just before or shortly before taking a reading and power off is feasible. Or if they need more time to get an accurate reading, finding the most optimal power cycle schedule to prolong sensor life while being able to take measurements at sensible times.
They’re just resistive electrodes with an analog sense of the conductivity of the soil, which is linearly correlated with moisture. It does this by applying a voltage to one side and sensing the current load to the other probe. This is exactly the same as electroplating, so if you keep them on 100% of the time, one will essentially dissolve in the dirt.
Instead, I run their power through a relay. I turn one relay on, it turns on all three of my sensors, I wait a few seconds, take three reads off each, one second apart, take the avg of each sensor, and record that. You can the save that to a timeseries database and host that locally too. Then plot that with Graphana.
Now that you have logs, you can check moisture levels before activating your irrigation.
The next step is I have a set of float sensors in the rain barrel, towards the bottom. If the bottom one indicates empty it activates a solenoid to refill from the tap until the top one indicates full. They’re about two inches apart.
I was considering a smart garden setup as well. I ended up going with a dumb version that has no dependency on any electrical power: Blumat. They’re from Austria, if i recall correctly. They feed water as the plants consume it.
The Blumat “carrots” are porous and as the soil dries, pressure becomes negative and opens up the switch that controls the feed water line, which then drips water onto the soil until its reached the calibrated moisture level which closes the switch.
Not “self-hosted” in the traditional sense but definitely hosted in the primitive sense.
You can self host a local chatgpt like ai known as a local large language model. Searx and Searxbg are great customizable meta search engines that you can customize to scrape whatever you want
Nextcloud-snap is surprisingly easy to setup. snap install nextcloud is all you need to have a functioning setup. Then run a second command to setup HTTPS and you’re good to go :D
While Vaultwarden is great I would not suggest selfhosting your password manager unless you do regular backups. Losing all your password cause your server went down is a great way to ruin your day.
I don’t think that’s true. Even when Bitwarden server is down you can still access your Bitwarden vault, use and export all passwords. You can’t save new passwords but using existing ones should work perfectly fine. So, when your server is down/broken, export your vault, fix server and get new Vaulwarden instance up and import your vault again. Thats it. I still find it safer to selfhost it than getting my passwords leaked.
Shame NPM is so easy to use compared to Traefik. I just bash my head against the wall if I try to use Traefik for anything but local docker containers. Point it at an external service? I would rather shoot myself
I actually find traefik rather nice to work with. I have a few Middleware chains set up, expose service using labels and add the chains to make sure I get the appropriate settings.
It’s really the phrasing “average joe”. I would genuinely give the average Joe a strong recommendation to not self host.
A beginner wanting to learn to be more techy and willing to put in hours for troubleshooting etc? Sure go ahead. But thats definitely not the average Joe.
My biggest advice to a beginner would be to buy a spare budget router, plug it into your ISP router, plug your pc into the new router and do all your messing around in your own network.
Break the internet because of bad configure? No stress, it’s only your little network, your flatmates/family aren’t yelling at you.
Can’t figure out what you did wrong and want the internet back to search? Just plug your pc back to the untouched ISP router so you get internet again
I don’t know. I think it speaks to something that we sometimes forget. Self hosting is great, but there’s a bit of time and commitment that’s needed for almost everything. Most people are used to single click, always works apps. Doing your own building, diagnostics, troubleshooting, and deployment can be a headache that’s too much for some people.
As others have worded it, it’s a hobby. Self hosting is only necessary for a very small number of people, less than one percent of people on here, but it’s a fun hobby, and I’ve learned a lot about software and networks from messing with self hosting stuff.
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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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Since no one else has mentioned it, I’ll give a shout out to documentation engine Outline. Definitely on the trickier side to set up (requires three auxiliary services to be configured) but creates great looking docs that share easily, allows for collaboration and is super fast.
This looks pretty cool, but I’m assuming the “audit trail” being limited to enterprise users means I can’t see version history on the free version. I’d consider paying the $4/user/month, but the 100 user minimum kinda kills that option for me. If I’m wrong and “audit trail” means something else, I’d strongly consider spinning up an instance!
Can confirm it has a per-page history, presented as a timeline. Not sure what additional capabilities the audit trail feature provides.
That looks super cool. Thanks!
Bookstack is also a good one. Haven’t set it up on the home server yet but when I was playing around with it on localhost it was pretty decent for my uses.
That looks super cool. Thanks!
WireGuard, helpful for accessing stuff on your internal network that you don’t want to expose while you’re out.
Tailscale is an easy way to get this setup too
And there is the opensource selfhosted implementation of that as well of course! https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
What about hosting a web server, would it not be quite a change too?
Meth labs. That will definitely change anyone’s life.
For me it’s a HomeAssistant instance. Great product that has some very tangible use cases that can benefit ones household in terms of being able to implement nice automations etc, and also a great hub in that it supports such a broad range of products and services. As an Apple user in particular its one of the great ways to get non HomeKit certified devices working with Siri/Homekit on my other Apple products.
It also makes installing addons a breeze including other products people have mentioned here such as AdGuard Home (as a PiHole alternative) and the like.
A few years ago I’d say it wasn’t for the average Joe, but I think the product has really matured and is much simpler than it used to be. There’s a strong community out there too.
For multimedia I’d say Plex personally, but Jellyfin would be another option. Good way to manage personal media libraries.
I always like the idea of home assistant, but I haven’t figured out a practical automation for my home. Maybe you can share some of your most useful automation?
It’s not the most complicated, but it’s nice.
Ceiling motion sensor above the stairwell leading to second floor that activates hue bulbs in the upstairs hall. Depending on the time of day it turns on for different lengths of times/brightness and at night for ~2 min to red to allow easy travel without upsetting eyes adjusted for darkness.
That and a similar one that we activate via our echos called “Bedtime for babies” that dims all the lights to have our little one start winding down.
Sure. I don’t have many enabled right now but some that I’ve used that are probably useful to others
I have a zigbee smart lock that was relatively cheap but didn’t have a sensor on it to detect if the door is open or closed, just a timer built in. To make the lock smarter so that it won’t attempt to lock if the door is open, I’ve used a $10 aqara sensors to detect if the door is opened or not and then combined those with the door lock to say, trigger a door lock after 5 minutes of the sensory closing, but only if the door isn’t opened again.
Another Aqara sensor automation that I don’t use any more as we moved to a house that has a carport rather than garage, but I used a contact sensor on my ‘dumb’ garage door to detect if the door was open or not. If the garage door was opened, the garage light would go on. Could do this other ways such as with motion sensors etc but unlike a motion sensor this would keep a light on until the door closed.
I have a robotic vacuum that I would automatically turn on when every person left the house. If someone was detected returning within a KM of the home, the robot would then return to the dock so it was out of the way when people got home. I really really loved this automation, but I haven’t used it since having kids 4 years ago as there has inevitably been too many toys etc that the vacuum would pick up now days. If your floor is relatively tidy but, it’s a great way to do a vacuum.
I haven’t explored it yet but Home Assistant pulls in my data from my solar panels and battery. In theory I could probably automate some of my appliances based on power generation or battery charge. Haven’t explored that fully yet however.
Those are some thoughts. Right now I use it mostly to bridge devices that otherwise don’t talk together or integrate with HomeKit. Haven’t played around with the automations for a bit, but meaning to go in and have a play with it more at some point. It’s a product I tinker with for a few weeks then let simmer for months before coming back too.
Where would one find these sensors? And, are they supported by the vendor for a decent amount of time?
Anytime I’ve tried finding door-open sensors in this price range, I can never find brands that seem well known and reputable (thinking of vendor updates), or that won’t take two months to ship to my place. Or is that just the trade off for the price?
Somewhere such as banggood - https://m.banggood.com/Aqara-Zigbee-1_2-Version-Window-Door-Sensor-Smart-Home-Kit-Remote-Alarm-Eco-System-p-1149705.html
Usually grab them on sale. Also a few others from the Aqara family such as climate (humidity and temperature) that you can get cheap. Have a motion sensory from them too that works ok but i don’t currently have in use.
I combine these with a Conbee II and in home assistant I use ZHA (over deConz, which is an option too) to manage connectivity to the sensors. I don’t use the Aqara hub any more as I’d rather run things locally via home assistant than using a third party hub which removes any potential concern around privacy. I’m honestly not sure if these sensors are upgradable or not but they work reasonably enough. Maybe once every 6 months I need to spend 2 minutes reconnecting one but it’s not too common. It helps to have some ZigBee smart power plugs scattered throughout the house, even if you aren’t automating power to things, as they form a mesh network which can make battery powered sensors more reliable.
I picked ZHA over deConz largely in the basis it’s development was linked to home assistant so I figured over time it’d see more development from the home assistant devs.
I aim to use ZigBee where I can over WiFi or Bluetooth devices. Lower power and more responsive in my experience. Also frees up the wifi traffic and the more ZigBee things you add the more reliable the mesh network gets.
Thanks for the great response! Especially about the Conbee II and ZHA pieces. I’m slowly piecing things together for my first wave of home automation, and this will definitely help with the analysis-paralysis I’ll hit along the way!
Thanks for the ideas! I really like the third one
A catch-all email server. I have a limitless amount of mail addresses going to me and my wife’s mailboxes. When an address gets leaked or start receiving spam I immediately know what company is to blame.
Outline for your own VPN. You can even try it for free in tandem with Google cloud
I have a PiHole, my own EdgeRouter that is behind the Verizon router, a UPS, a wired switch, a SiliconDust HD HomeRun to convert my cable to a stream, my Hue controller, my Camera DVR, and a Pi4 hosting network storage.
It all fits neatly in a 6U closet rack. I use the EdgeRouter to host a VPN I can connect into to manage things for the house, and also use it to dial out to a VPN, so I can connect the TVs in the house to a VPN abroad.
I also have a Smart Garden powered by a raspberry pi, connected to a rain barrel, a water pump, some solenoids, and some moisture sensors.
Smart garden sounds amazing! My girlfriend would love that… Maybe I’ll set that up with her!
Yes I actually have two of them. My backyard has three outdoor moisture sensors, so it can know if it’s moist enough. It has a drop irrigation system connected to regular plastic pressure for tubing. It has two zones that can be controlled with two solenoids. It also has a 12V pump. All of that is powered by a 12V power supply and controlled by a four zone relay board. Remember to turn the power off to your outdoor sensors so that they don’t destroy themselves when you’re not sensing. You can also add a flow sensor to measure your water consumption.
Hey that sounds amazing, may I ask what moisture sensors you are using?
Edit: also automating sensor power draw sounds like something fun to work on. I’d love to test if having them power on just before or shortly before taking a reading and power off is feasible. Or if they need more time to get an accurate reading, finding the most optimal power cycle schedule to prolong sensor life while being able to take measurements at sensible times.
ACEIRMC 2set Soil Moisture… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JSND12L?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
They’re just resistive electrodes with an analog sense of the conductivity of the soil, which is linearly correlated with moisture. It does this by applying a voltage to one side and sensing the current load to the other probe. This is exactly the same as electroplating, so if you keep them on 100% of the time, one will essentially dissolve in the dirt.
Instead, I run their power through a relay. I turn one relay on, it turns on all three of my sensors, I wait a few seconds, take three reads off each, one second apart, take the avg of each sensor, and record that. You can the save that to a timeseries database and host that locally too. Then plot that with Graphana.
To read the analog values, I use this: HiLetgo 3pcs ADS1115 16 Bit 16… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VPFLSMX?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
Now that you have logs, you can check moisture levels before activating your irrigation.
The next step is I have a set of float sensors in the rain barrel, towards the bottom. If the bottom one indicates empty it activates a solenoid to refill from the tap until the top one indicates full. They’re about two inches apart.
I was considering a smart garden setup as well. I ended up going with a dumb version that has no dependency on any electrical power: Blumat. They’re from Austria, if i recall correctly. They feed water as the plants consume it.
The Blumat “carrots” are porous and as the soil dries, pressure becomes negative and opens up the switch that controls the feed water line, which then drips water onto the soil until its reached the calibrated moisture level which closes the switch.
Not “self-hosted” in the traditional sense but definitely hosted in the primitive sense.
My larger system is entirely 12V power and is connected directly into a 2-panel 24V solar system with battery.
But entirely mechanical without external input like power is a really good idea.
Those sound really useful. I like the no power aspect that just works.
SearxNG for search: https://docs.searxng.org/
You can try it using a public instance if you like, but since installing it is easy and painless, just go for it.
You can self host a local chatgpt like ai known as a local large language model. Searx and Searxbg are great customizable meta search engines that you can customize to scrape whatever you want
Nextcloud-snap is surprisingly easy to setup.
snap install nextcloudis all you need to have a functioning setup. Then run a second command to setup HTTPS and you’re good to go :Ddeleted by creator
Swinger parties?
Exactly a couple of things that we (me and the wife) use really often:
While Vaultwarden is great I would not suggest selfhosting your password manager unless you do regular backups. Losing all your password cause your server went down is a great way to ruin your day.
I don’t think that’s true. Even when Bitwarden server is down you can still access your Bitwarden vault, use and export all passwords. You can’t save new passwords but using existing ones should work perfectly fine. So, when your server is down/broken, export your vault, fix server and get new Vaulwarden instance up and import your vault again. Thats it. I still find it safer to selfhost it than getting my passwords leaked.
I would look at this https://youtu.be/uaixCKTaqY0 in regards to nginx proxy manager. It might not apply to you but worth knowing at least.
Shame NPM is so easy to use compared to Traefik. I just bash my head against the wall if I try to use Traefik for anything but local docker containers. Point it at an external service? I would rather shoot myself
I actually find traefik rather nice to work with. I have a few Middleware chains set up, expose service using labels and add the chains to make sure I get the appropriate settings.
If you only use it with your local containers than sure, I have a similar setup myself. But if I try to break from that prison…
Self hosting nothing changed my life.
So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅
It’s disappointing that this is the highest voted comment on a thread in the selfhosted topic…
It’s really the phrasing “average joe”. I would genuinely give the average Joe a strong recommendation to not self host.
A beginner wanting to learn to be more techy and willing to put in hours for troubleshooting etc? Sure go ahead. But thats definitely not the average Joe.
My biggest advice to a beginner would be to buy a spare budget router, plug it into your ISP router, plug your pc into the new router and do all your messing around in your own network.
Break the internet because of bad configure? No stress, it’s only your little network, your flatmates/family aren’t yelling at you.
Can’t figure out what you did wrong and want the internet back to search? Just plug your pc back to the untouched ISP router so you get internet again
I don’t know. I think it speaks to something that we sometimes forget. Self hosting is great, but there’s a bit of time and commitment that’s needed for almost everything. Most people are used to single click, always works apps. Doing your own building, diagnostics, troubleshooting, and deployment can be a headache that’s too much for some people.
As others have worded it, it’s a hobby. Self hosting is only necessary for a very small number of people, less than one percent of people on here, but it’s a fun hobby, and I’ve learned a lot about software and networks from messing with self hosting stuff.