Transcription
Welcome back. As the holiday season wraps up and we get started on 2026, I figure some people might have decided to get into home labbing over the holidays and are wondering where to get started. One of the ideas with a home lab is being able to self-host your own software that you might otherwise get from a traditional cloud service. Today, I'm going to walk through nine ideas of software to self-host in your home lab. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, but is designed to give you some programs to look into and maybe be a jumping off point to find other great pieces of software.
Oh, one more thing before we get into this. I highly recommend setting up a virtual machine environment such as Proxmox. This will allow you to try self-hosting different pieces of software in an easy to set up and tear down environment. I'm not going to go into how to set up a Proxmox server on your own. There are tons of great content out there on how to do it. What we're going to do is we're going to jump right into the list of um programs to check out right now.
I'm going to start with a number of options for media management, which is a common first step in home labbing. So, let's start off with Plex. Plex is a polished stream your own media platform that turns your movies, TV shows, music, and a little more into a Netflix-like experience you can watch from just about any device. Thanks to a huge ecosystem of clients for smart TVs, phones, game consoles, and browsers, you can run Plex Media Server in your home home lab. Point it at your library and it handles the nice stuff: metadata, posters, watch history, profiles, and playback while doing transcoding when a device can't play a format directly. And with the right setup, hardware transcoding can help out a lot. Plex is popular with beginner home labbers because it's easy, easy to set up, and it just works, especially for remote streaming and family sharing.
Now, like I said, I'm not going to go into all the trade-offs with these products. This is designed just to give you a sense of what's out there. Um, Plex is not free. Well, there is a free version, but if you want some of the advanced features such as hardware transcoding, I think, and download support, uh you will have to pay uh a monthly fee for that. And that could be a negative for some people which drive them in another direction. Now, personally, I use Plex quite a bit. I use it for everything in terms of hosting um family photos, movies. That's Plex. Definitely worth uh checking out.
Next up, we have Jellyfin. A close relative of Plex. Many people go back and forth between Plex or Jellyfin. They've tried both and find one that works for you. I recommend checking out both and seeing which one you like better, or there's actually lots of great content out there that directly compares the two and will give you a good sense of where to start. But similar to to Plex, uh, Jellyfin is a, well, not similar, somewhat similar. So, Jellyfin is a free, totally open-source media server that turns your home library into your own personal streaming service. You point it at your movies, shows, and music. It automatically organizes everything with artwork, metadata, seasons, you know, the general uh idea like I described before. Um, it can stream to different apps on TVs, phones, browsers, etc. And it supports hardware transcoding.
Now, I did, I have not tried Jellyfin directly to be uh totally transparent here. I did some looking into it and it looks like it has a somewhat reduced ecosystem of client programs and can be a little more difficult to set up, but people really like the hardware transcoding and it also supports streaming, I think, ebooks, comic books, and audiobooks, which Plex does not. Now for me, I use an Apple TV as one of my primary clients and I don't believe there is one for Jellyfin right now, which is why I've stuck with Plex. But again, it's something else worth worth looking into as you start to set up your home lab and find the set of programs that's right for you.
All right, as we keep going down our tour of uh self-hosting different media solutions, one worth looking at is Immich. So, Immich is a self-hosted photo and video platform that you can think of as, you know, Google Photos that you run in your home. Uh, you install the server and the mobile app, turn on automatic backups, and you get a fast timeline view with albums and a modern UI that makes huge libraries feel pretty pretty darn manageable. And where Immich really stands out is it is its search and organization. Uh, it has machine learning features like face grouping and object scene search, so you can actually find things instead of just dumping files into folders.
Now, I've started to play with Immich recently, and I pointed it at about a terabyte of information on a NAS, and over a 10 gig network, it probably took the better part of a day to get everything indexed and and do all of its magic. And you know what? So far, I am pretty impressed. The UI is very smooth um and fast, showing uh the different thumbnails and allowing you to search through things. And I also talked about the machine learning capabilities. It went through and built this whole index and categorization of my photos. So, I could go type in something like soccer or pool or whatever and it figured it out. Um, and I've only poked at it a little, but so far it looks like a really great addition to your home lab.
And next up, more in the productivity space, we have Nextcloud, which is a self-hosted personal cloud that can replace a big chunk of what you use Google Drive or Dropbox for. It gives you a web interface plus desktop and mobile clients to sync your files, share folders and links, and access everything from everywhere on your network or even remotely. The real power is that it's more than storage. Nextcloud has an app ecosystem that can add calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, photo viewing, and even collaboration tools, as well as integrations with online document editing sites. So you can take it with, start with the basic file sync capability and turn it into a full productivity suite.
Now I have used Nextcloud just a little bit and I think if you are looking at something like a Synology for your NAS, you'll tend towards the applications built into the Synology such as Synology Drive, etc. But if you're not going to use a Synology and you're looking for a good file sync solution across your home lab or your household, maybe you're running TrueNAS, Nextcloud may be uh a good option for you. Now, a bunch of the collaboration tools and document editing tools seem like they're geared more towards a small office or professional environment. Maybe not something you need in a home lab, but the functionality is there if you ever grow to it.
And next up, we have Ollama. Maybe you've wondered as you've been using a tool like ChatGPT, how can I run this in my home lab environment? How is it possible to self-host models? And the answer is yes. And Ollama makes it amazingly simple. It's basically a lightweight way to run large language models locally on your own hardware. You install it with a quick script. You pull a model, start it with a simple command, and basically you get a chat interface right out of the box. It also exposes a local API so other apps can interact with it, chat with it, summarize text, write code, or do whatever you want to do. All of this happens without sending your prompts and your data to a cloud service. It's running right there on your local GPU.
And you can take Ollama and you compare it with another tool called Open WebUI, which gives a friendly front end that makes Ollama feel almost like a ChatGPT-style interface where you get a clean web interface for chatting, managing models, organizing conversations, and you can even plug in additional capabilities such as web search and RAG capabilities as well. So, I have uh done videos on both of these and it's dead simple to set up in your home lab and it's definitely worth checking out.
Next up, we have SearXNG or SearXNG. I actually looked up how to pronounce this and I I got a bunch of different answers, so I'm going to go with SearXNG or like search next generation. But here's the basic idea. Imagine being able to self-host your own search engine right in your home so you can stop being tracked and stop sending all your information to Google or whoever. SearXNG isn't exactly that, but it gets you pretty darn close. It's a self-hosted privacy-focused meta search engine. So instead of searching directly on Google, Bing, etc., what it does is it queries multiple search providers for you, then aggregates your results into one clean page that looks very Google-like. And the big one here is privacy and control. It's designed to avoid tracking and profiling. And you can choose exactly which search engines are enabled. Uh set defaults for things like language and safe search and keep your search history on your server. And then you can pair it with a VPN. So all your search is then routed over uh a VPN connection. And I've used this. I think I did some other videos on this. Super easy to set up and run in your home lab. And it's just, it's a great addition to add that layer of privacy to your home lab environment.
And we're going to keep on moving and talk about Chasm. Now when you start to play around with home labs and you play with virtualization environments like Proxmox or you play around with containers, you start to find yourself realizing that these environments are great because they're they can be quickly created and disposed. Which means if you want to do something like, who knows, maybe you want to click on a link you're not so sure about, go to a website you're not so sure about, these tools allow you to create these disposable environments. Right now. Imagine if you had an overall tool that makes the whole management of those environments dead simple. That's exactly what Chasm is.
So, what Chasm Workspace is is a self-hosted platform that streams containerized apps and full desktops into your browser. So, you can launch a clean Linux workspace, a disposable Chrome or Firefox session, or a specific tool in seconds without installing anything on the machine you're sitting on. In a home lab environment, it's awesome for safe sandbox use cases, testing random downloads, doing admin work from a lockdown device. Um, basically because each session is ephemeral and separated from your main system, it completely makes things uh simple and safe for you at home.
Now, Chasm is more designed for an environment where you want to offer these workspaces to say uh employees or a group of workers where they can spin up the workspace on a server, do what they need to do, and throw it away. You could basically run entire development environments that way. However, in a home lab environment, it's just great for those, you know, quick to set up and dispose environments. And like I said, you can do it for a specific app or an entire operating system. Like you could spin up an entire instance of Windows or Linux. And what it's doing behind the scenes is basically handling all the container management for you. Um, all the streaming probably through Apache Guacamole. I'm not quite sure though. I actually did a video on configuring that myself. And if you had to set up all these on your own, it would be quite a bit of work. Chasm wraps it up and makes it super simple for you. And like many of these other tools, it's dead simple to install. So getting it running in your home lab is probably just a few minutes of your time.
So maybe you've started using a password manager, something like LastPass, etc. And if you've done any digging, maybe you have concerns about keeping all of your passwords on someone else's server, even if it's supposedly encrypted. You can actually self-host your own password server with Bitwarden. And so Bitwarden is a password manager and a password vault. And it has a self-hosted solution that allows you to run your own password vault server on your own machine. So your credentials, your secure notes, all your shared items live on your infrastructure. You can still use the standard Bitwarden apps on your phone, browser, and desktop. And it just is communicating with your infrastructure behind the scenes. Another addition to your home lab if you want to go down the route of handling all of your passwords locally.
And we're going to wrap this up with uh last but certainly not least, I think Pi-hole or running your own DNS server is a backbone of many home lab environments. And it's a place where many people start. And so just to to go through it, Pi-hole is a self-hosted DNS service that blocks ads and trackers for your entire network in one shot. Everything on your network from your phones, your PCs, TVs, everything else gets the functionality offered by Pi-hole and all the ad blocking and tracking blocking. Uh you can run Pi-hole on its own VM, a container, or even something as small as a Raspberry Pi. You just set it up. Again, it can, I think these days it has a simple Docker container setup. But even before that, it was just a simple script uh that installs it. Then you point your network configuration at it and it just manages itself.
And the nice thing about Pi-hole is you can then go configure the filtering even more and augment the set of block lists it adds. So you can really kind of lock down uh the sites that it allows through. You can uh do a bunch of different things. It even has local name resolution if you want. And if you want to get go a little further with it, you can run multiple instances of Pi-hole and then link them with a tool called keepalived so you have some level of redundancy. And then if you want to go even further, I suggest looking at an additional tool called Unbound. We'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. But just to kind of wrap it up, Pi-hole is a great addition to your home lab environment. I've been using it. I run it on a Raspberry Pi primarily and I also keep it running on a VM with keepalived managing which one is the primary and it's been rock solid for for years at this point.
And that wraps it up. That has been a super quick tour of a number of programs that are great to check out for self-hosting in your home lab. And like I said at the top, this is really a jumping off point to explore the whole lab environment and all the software that's out there that you can start to play with and hopefully just have fun and and learn a bunch along the way. Uh we'll leave it here with that and I'm curious, what else would you add to this list? Throw it down in the comments below.