Transcription
So it's pretty common for tech channels to do a couple of videos each year showing off what they're self-hosting and the hardware they're using to do it. This is one of those videos.
In this video I'm going to walk you through almost all of the self-hosted apps that I'm currently running, give a bit of information where it makes sense, and talk about how they fit into my setup. If you're curious about the hardware that I'm using to power all of this let me know down in the comments and I'm happy to make a follow-up video covering that.
And while you're poking around down there if you enjoy this kind of content take a second to hit the like and subscribe buttons, it really does help more than you might actually think. If you'd like to go a step further consider becoming a channel member or joining my Patreon because members get ad-free access to my content and sometimes even early access to upcoming videos.
Now I say almost all of my self-hosted apps because the other system that I've got up and running is a media-based file server and YouTube likes to be inconsistent with allowing people to talk about those kinds of things. Now a lot of my videos recently have had disclaimers in them and I think that's kind of what this is. This isn't a tutorial video. I'm just going to be showing you the services that I'm running and talking about them briefly. If you've got questions about anything that I talk about in this video let me know in the comment section down below and maybe I'll make a video explaining in more detail.
So the services that we're taking a look at today are running on Proxmox which I've been using since around early 2022 and at this point I honestly can't imagine switching to anything else. It's solid, it's easy to use, and the Proxmox backup server that I've got running in a VM on one of my Synology boxes hasn't let me down yet. Currently I'm running 18 LXC containers and 2 VMs and my approach is pretty simple. I get one service per container or VM. For instance, the container running my WordPress site also includes Redis, MySQL, a Cloudflare Tunnel Agent, Portainer, Portainer Agent, and Watchtower.
Now I use a dedicated Cloudflare Tunnel per app. So if something gets compromised or goes wonky, I can shut down that specific app's access without impacting anything else. Now that said, I have been considering finally moving to Pangolin, but I haven't afforded myself the time to take on that task just yet.
Portainer gives me a graphical user interface or a GUI for managing Docker containers and the Portainer Agent lets me view and update all of my containers from one dashboard. Now I do still have to log into each LXC or VM to manage the stacks themselves, but honestly I rarely ever have to do that.
Now I know that some of you are going to cringe at what I'm about to say, but I still manually update all of my different containers because I like to do it. It's worked for me for years and I'm really not comfortable automating that process at this point. So I use Watchtower to check for updates daily and then it sends me notifications on those updates via Gotify. Now that said, I do still need to find a replacement for Watchtower since it hasn't been updated in longer than I would like to talk about right now. So let me know what service you use to get updates about your containers.
Also, how do you handle container updates in your home lab? Do you do it automated? Do you do it manually like me or really? I do some mix of both and I do that because the services that do get updated automatically, I don't really care. It doesn't really matter if they crash and I have to rebuild them. So I just let it fly and whatever happens, happens. And luckily that hasn't impacted me yet either.
So with that preface out of the way, let's talk about what I'm actually self-hosting. One of my new favorite apps is called Moretta. Now I was using 13 foot ladder, but Moretta is better. It basically, it gets around those annoyances on websites, specifically news sites that ask you to disable your ad blockers or limit the number of articles that you can read within a given timeframe. And I understand that news sites and these reporting sites and that sort of thing do still need to make money. But I also feel like the news shouldn't be locked behind a paywall and even the FBI has encouraged people to block ads.
Another relatively new app to my setup is Dumbpad. And in fact, I wrote this video script using it. It's one of those does one thing really well kind of tools. And I really appreciate that. In fact, we looked at some of the dumb apps earlier this year, and this one quickly became a go-to app for me.
Now in the same note-taking category, we've got Memos. And we looked at this back in 2023. And while it's still running, I actually haven't touched it since 2024. And at this point, I'm wondering if it's worth keeping around. And that brings me to another question. And that is, how do you decide when it's time to retire a self-hosted service?
Now, while I haven't retired the next service, I did have to scale back its availability several months ago, and that's LinkStack. Now if you're not familiar with LinkStack, it's a self-hosted replacement for Linktree. Now I've had this again running since 2023. And at first I let just anyone sign up and use it. And that turned out to be a huge mistake, as it got abused very, very quickly, with lots of gambling sites and adult links and that sort of usual nonsense. So I wiped out all of the accounts, and I removed the ability to register new accounts. And now it's just my account. It's much cleaner, and it's much easier to manage.
That theme of scaling back continues with HedgeDoc. It's another note-taking app that I've had running since like October, I think of 2023. And while it's a very solid app, I just don't use it all that much lately, because I've pretty much just switched over to Dumpad. So I have a feeling that HedgeDoc is also going to go here pretty quickly. And I have to wonder how many other people are going through a simple tools only phase recently.
Now I've also got the WordPress stack that I mentioned earlier that powers dbtechreviews.com. Now I've owned this domain since 2017, and started publishing on it, I think in early 2018. And while it's not something that I update constantly, I do try to keep it maintained and add a few new posts every once in a while.
Next, I've got a service called URLs, which I've also had up and running since 2017. It's a simple link shortening service. And while it's not fancy, it does give me the stats that I need for my purposes. And something that I was thinking about while I was working on this script, both of the WordPress site for dbtechreviews and URLs used to live on a managed hosting provider before I brought them in-house. Basically, once I got confident with my setup and my processes, I migrated them into my home lab, and they've been running here locally ever since.
So now let's talk real briefly about DNS level ad blocking for a moment with AdGuard Home. Now I've actually got two instances of AdGuard Home set up. And yes, you really should have two instances of whatever ad blocking service you've got up and running at the DNS level. The reason for that is, if your only instance goes down and your router is pointing to it for DNS, you're done. You're no more internet until you get that issue fixed. Basically, the idea is two instances on two pieces of hardware, and you've got some resilience built in.
The next service is a must-have for me. And that's Vaultwarden. Now I moved away from a paid password manager after one too many price hikes, feature removals and data breaches. Vaultwarden has been solid, and even my wife is mostly a fan, which in my opinion, is pretty awesome.
Then there's LendPaste, which I occasionally use when I need to share something like a Docker Compose file, or a code snippet. And we actually talked about this back I think in 2022. Unfortunately, the devs stopped maintaining it and there hasn't been an update in over a year. So if you've got a good pastebin style app that you love, let me know down in the comment section, because I would really love to try something new.
Bookstack was one of the first apps that I deployed in my home lab as a companion site to my YouTube channel, and it's still up and running. Originally, I used it to share Docker Compose files from my videos, but it turned into a mess trying to keep all of them current. I barely even touch it now aside from container updates, but surprisingly, it still gets like 5 to 10,000 views a month, so I leave it running.
Not every app is bound to stick around though, and Orb is another one of those that I set up for a video and never got around to using it after that. And it's probably going to get shut down here pretty soon as well. On the other hand, Postiz has been incredibly helpful for me recently with posting on all of the different social medias and scheduling and all of that sort of thing. If you're not familiar with Postiz, you can check out the video that I did on it recently.
The next app on my list is Speedtest, and honestly, it mostly runs passively. And what I mean by that is, I've got a widget for it in my homepage dashboard. But for me, mostly, it's just useful for looking back at my data if my ISP starts acting up. But luckily, I haven't had any issues in almost two years, so I'm going to call that a win.
Another app that I've got up and running currently that's probably going to get shut down is Fighter. I set that up last year hoping people would use it to suggest new content ideas, but I didn't promote it well, so almost no one has used it. These days though, my Discord suggestions channel gets way more engagement, so that's kind of where I've shifted my focus and again like I said, I will probably shut down Fighter here pretty soon.
Getting a bit deeper into infrastructure now and nearing the end of the list, I've got an Ansible and Semaphore LXC that handles all of the OS updates for all of my LXCs. And what I mean by that is it's supposed to, but it's been an ongoing battle to get things working consistently. It worked fine a couple of weeks ago, and despite nothing changing since then, I've been getting error messages for some reason and I need to investigate that a bit. So we'll see what happens with Ansible as I'm not quite ready to give up on it just yet.
Now I've got another LXC here that has Gotify on it and originally when I set it up it was supposed to just be for hosting Ansible playbooks and Docker compose files and some scripts that I use from time to time, but I decided to go ahead and add Gotify to that setup so that I'd have a place to get notifications from Watchtower and Ansible.
One service that I'm really glad that I finally got around to is Home Assistant. Now I avoided it for a long time after a not-so-great first experience. I was watching a live stream of somebody demonstrating it and I asked what I thought was a basic question, which was something to the effect of what's the easiest way to get started. And I felt like their answer was very dismissive and they're like, well, you just do it. And then they didn't respond to anything else I asked for the rest of that stream. And that kind of turned me off from the whole thing. But the community in our Discord brought it up at some point and convinced me to give it another go. And I'm so, so glad that they did as it's made my life around the house much smoother. And honestly, it is kind of fun to just tinker with.
And the last VM that I've got in my setup was originally just a Plex VM with an RTX 2070 GPU passed through for hardware transcoding and setting up an Nvidia GPU to work in Linux was not the highlight of my year. Between drivers, toolkits, tweaking Docker compose files, all of the nonsense that goes along with that. It was a process and I could probably do it again if I had to, but I really hope I don't have to.
Now I mentioned that this was originally a Plex VM, but I have since added OLAMA to that so that I can have an AI voice assistant attached to my Home Assistant voice PE. And that's been a lot of fun to have and play with. So I can have my own locally hosted AI assistant who can do things around the house like turn lights on and off and adjust things as necessary. And that's also been a whole lot of fun to mess with over the past few months.
So that's the tour. That's almost everything that I'm currently self-hosting. And I would love to hear from you what your favorite self-hosted apps are. Also, let me know what you think I'm missing in my setup or something that you think I should try. Let me know that in the comment section down below. And again, if you enjoyed this video, don't forget to hit like and subscribe. And if you want to support the channel more directly and get ad-free and sometimes early access to my content, you might consider becoming a channel member or joining me on Patreon. It really does help me kind of keep things moving along. So I think with all of that said, I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up. And I want to thank you guys for spending a few minutes of your day here with me today, and I'll talk in the next video.