What is a service you host you never knew you needed?
What is a service you host you never knew you needed?
I think everybody on here is constantly keeping an eye out for what to host next. Sometimes you spinup something which chugs along nicely but sometimes you find out you've been missing out.
For me it's not very refreshing or new: Paperless-ngx. Never thought I would add all my administration to it. But it's great. I probably can't find the thing I need, but I should have a record of every mail or letter I've gotten. Close second is Wanderer. But I would like to have a little bit more features like adding recorded routes to view speed and compare with previous walks. But that's not what it is intended for.
What is that service for you?
Been using anytype.io (self-hosted) for a month now and it has been amazing.
Using it as a journal, bookmark manager, general note taking, etc...
I host Immich, Jellyfin , readeef, and open-webui for myself. From those, Immich is definitely the unlikely hero of the bunch
IIRC immich is like a google photos replacement. I use nextcloud for that on android but it's not so simple on ios. How's immich for ios, do uploads work automatically in the background? How's performance?
Actual Budget a selfhosting budget software. It helps me keep track of my finances
That looks nice. Added it to my list to look at. Thanks.
Never knew I needed? Another vote for Paperless-ngx. I still feel like I'm living in the future using it. The trick I've found was initially setting up a good document naming & management convention & following it religiously for every document. The search function is fantastic at narrowing down results. Used in conjunction with specific coloured tags I can immediately see what I need from search results.
Fired up Immich recently. Amazing. Will be donating as I like their stance.
I also enjoy Linkwarden. Switched from the also excellent Hoarder as I prefer the UI.
Most used? Nextcloud with Joplin.
@[email protected] funnily enough, I switched from Linkwarden to Hoarder. I like the smart lists. Just bookmark everything, check it later.
I've been eyeing that. Using linkding for 'functional' sites & linkwarden for articles at the moment.
I like linkding a lot, but am too lazy to tag things properly.
Syncthing. Decentralized data backup that works with minimal setup. Now I can add cloud sync to most any app.
I setup my own with a bash script for backup years ago that uses rsync, feel too invested in that now to change
That's easily Home Assistant. It got me into the whole home automation stuff and I have gradually included more and more parts into it - including some health related stuff. It really makes my family's life easier and helps us organizing it.
You've got a good point with Home Assistant. I have automations setup so that I barely have to do anything manually. So I almoat forget that Home Assistant runs quite a lot in my home. And especially in the beginning it was nice to setup but not really needed. Know it is needed.
Joplin.
Ive been paying for Workflowy and honestly, I've reached my limit of cost vs value.
I needed a way to do more than just bullets, like Evernote without the bloat, or OneNote/Notes without the megacorp, something I can export and read 100 years from now.
I was surprised how often I use it, and slowly weening off of Workflowy.
I love Joplin on the PC, but i hate the phone app. I don't want to do markdown on ny phone.
Immich, SearXNG, FreshRSS
Immich! Backs up my phone pictures for my family with automatic backup through an easy app interface. Knowing my large album of photos on my phone won’t be tied to an endless growing subscription fees for…ever?!
Same!
Did not realize how good it is to have digital albums with the family! And also having a backup is great as well, for a peace of mind.
Immich is fantastic. Yes.
Is this accessible outside your own home network, or is it restricted to local?
Same as any piece of software you’re hosting, it’s up to you to decide. I run my instance on my Hetzner vm.
It's very accessible with a reverse proxy. Just please be secure if you choose to do so. It's been a wonderful piece of software and i will be paying for the lifetime server license this weekend.
The one that was way more useful then expected is immich. I have over 100,000 photos I took during my life and it usually takes me DAYS to find a specific picture I need.
I installed immich and let it AI scan everything for a week or something. Now I can search for something specific like “it’s a black square in the middle of the photo and has a little knob on it” and it finds me the photo I need.
It’s also cool to see photos of people, organized by the individual by searching their name or clicking on their face.
Pet detection is sorta on the roadmap for 2025... I couldn't be happier.
+1 for immich, if I didn't already know I would be doing photo backups it would have been my entry. For things "I didn't know I needed"
I think that's the last prod I needed to finally switch.
Is this local only? No clouds reported data?
Of course it is.
You can download different models as well. For me, without a GPU, searching for example 'cat' takes a few seconds, and it is not the most accurate, but still works OK.
Local only.
I've only just set it up, mainly for the facial recognition. I had no idea that it could do that type of search too. It's going to be really helpful with my faulty brain and not remembering words 🙂
Unpopular opinion from what I've seen in this forum, but for me it is Nextcloud followed by Jellyfin.
I use Nextcloud setup fory whole family, about a dozen all together. I even sprang for the DavX5 plugin for several people so we can share calendars and contacts as well as files and notes. We backup photos from our phones using the Nextcloud app. Several of us use it as a backend for KeePass.
We use Jellyfin for streaming; movies, tv, music videos and music. It is the backend storage and library organizer for four Kodi boxes, five browsers, several phones and tablets and a couple of Roku's. It works like a champ, even with the occasional library re-sync.
Paperless - Pay slips, Bank statements, MOT records, Insurance policies, User manuals, restaurant menus. All filed and searchable. Letters I get are photographed, uploaded and immediately disposed of, zero stress.
Something a lot of people miss with paperless is its automatic import options.
There is a folder called 'consume' that you can place files in and paperless will import them just like you'd uploaded them manually. Combined with tools like FolderSync or SyncThing you can have files on all sorts of devices automatically upload to paperless.
Sitting down to use the flatbed scanner is a hassle, so I use GoogleLens to take multiple photos of a document, save them as a single pdf, then FolderSync moves that to my server automatically where paperless imports it.
Along side this; Paperless has an smtp mail importer. You can add your email accounts and paperless will automatically import new emails based on whatever criteria you specify. Imported mail will then be flagged, moved, or outright deleted from the mail server.
You're right, I don't take advantage of any of these features. I should.
Partly because of lack of know how on my part. So I don't trust myself to successfully have it log into my email, get what it needs and leave everything else untouched. My main uploads, payslips and bank statements, are behind their own apps too.
Partly because paperless is isolated in it's own little container (in my setup at least) so access to the consume folder is behind another step, I could syncthing it... I just haven't.
And partly because I use the android app as my main interaction with Paperless. The app uses my phone as a good-enough scanner.
Is the document exporter the only backup system? I'd want to connect it to a cloud backup somehow if I'm going to trust it with all my important stuff.
It stores the documents in the form they were imported in a folder called '/originals/', with the contents sorted according to the rules you set in paperless. You can back that up however you'd like.
So paperless works as a service that ties into your storage. I point mine at an NFS share on my Synology and just backup that share. The documents are all stored as PDFs still so worst case I still have “dumb” copies without all the tagging available if my paperless instance goes offline for some reason.
Couldn't tell you, sorry. I have Paperless in it's own LXC (helper-script) which I 3-2-1 as a machine. Many duplicates, but they're only PDFs.
I can tell you I spent a small amount of time trying (and failing) to get paperless to save the files onto my NAS. I can also tell you, if I stretched up really tall I can just about scrape rock bottom when it comes to skills in this stuff.
Is there a way to share groups of files at once? For example I currently share tax files with my accountant using seafile so right now I scan everything and just drop it into a folder. I would love to use paperless but being able to share folder that can be downloaded all at once is a critical workflow for me.
You can configure storage paths. That way, you can direct tags to be stored in a specific folder.
You can then get the files for the accountant from your file system.
The way you would do this with paperless is to create a user in paperless for your accountant to login to.
You would then grant that user permission to view/edit either: a tag, a storage path, a document type, a correspondent, or just individual documents. (or any/all of the above).
When it comes to providing external share links that anyone can use; you can only share single files at a time in paperless. If that's what you're looking for, I'd recommend FileBrowser. You can create a permanent share link that allows anyone that views it to view the contents of a folder and download each file or the whole collection as a .zip. You can even add a password required to view the page if you like.
I do not know. I don't believe you can provide a share link for a whole tag, just individual documents. I'm not seeing an obvious way of exporting a tag either.
You could run paperless in parallel and syncthing your files into its "consume" folder.
Forgejo. There are so many things that can use a git repo but I don't want to have them out in the wild, so I host them myself, safe and sound behind my firewall.
I also mirror other github forks so they don't go away whenever those services decide to rugpull them.
I started with gitea but found it difficult to backup. I've been using gogs for a while now and find it minimal and easy to administrate.
I run it in a docker on zfs so snapshots backed up to PBS seem pretty bulletproof.
Do you manually mirror and keep the forks up to date? Or is there an automation for it?
There's automation and you can do it manually if needed. For example I have a couple of emulators that pull every 24 hours from GitHub just in case nint tendo gets a little lawsuit heavy. I also have one offs from GitHub that pull down when I want.
You can also mirror a public repo from GitHub into a private repo so it does not gets indexed/ai trained.
Recipe manager and meal planner which can pull recipes from the web. I started using it after a few recipes on sites disappeared. My families most used app (besides plex).
I landed on Tandoor. I had a bunch of recipes on one of those web sites and they switched to a subscription model and locked me out of my recipes. I don't remember why I chose Tandoor over Mealie, but having full ownership over my recipes is freeing.
been loving mealie too! tied in with home assistant for shopping list and the meal planning calendar has helped us cook more together and stop spending so much on takeout!
Oh I'm going to have to check that out!
Thanks, this looks awesome, last one I tried was tandoor but didn't really liked it, the import/export capabilities of this one make it a lot more interesting for me, to ensure I can recover the recipes or build them into markdown files if I ever want to migrate away from it.
I didn't know if this was something I was missing, but man this could be my new number 1. The import function is really great. I've already added a lot of recipes. Thanks!
Thanks, installed it right away ;)
Kavita for my ebook collection—mostly tabletop RPGs, but some comics and sci fi as well.
I don’t actually use the web interface that often. I add books to my Kavita library, then scan the OPDS feed into my scratch-my-own-itch mobile app, Bookoscope, and download whatever I want to read onto my tablet from there.
Side note, PDFs are the absolute worst. Even reading them on a full-sized tablet is incredibly annoying. Anybody have any tips/tricks/apps for that?
I usually convert pdfs to epub if its something I actually need to read and not just scan/browse. Often I would bother to even edit the epub in Sigil to fix any problems with the conversion.
FreshRSS, i had it installed and setup with a fee feeds for over a year and only like this month has it become my daily read, i can get almost everything in there to just read through while I drink my coffee, sites I bookmarked but never go to can now come to me.
Also with 'five filters full text rss' to get all the images in the feed
Would you mind elaborating a bit? I've been looking into good rss solutions lately and blogs without a feed were where I got stuck. How do you use five filters? How do the two components work together?
Edit: Also, some sites WITH a feed like Pitchfork are next to useless when all you get is the headline.
Here's a short blog post that summarizes how to use Full-Text RSS with FreshRSS. It's a bit of a pain to add new feeds but it makes for a smooth experience afterwards.
Otherwise, you could always just use RSS clients that have the ability to fetch full articles, Read You on Android and Fluent Reader on desktop both can do this.
What's the extension for? FreshRSS can fetch contents natively.
The extension is to get the rss link to paste into five filters
Five filters takes the link and gets all the images and all that then makes a new rss link that you give to fresh rss.
When I tried just fresh rss a lot of the sites I tried wouldn't get me images or it would be just the headline and I would have to click the link and go to the actual site to read the article
I'm hodsting my own Matrix server with WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord (you don't need a bot for that, you can just share your login with the bridge) and Messenger bridge. I have all my IMs in one app, don't have to install spyware on my phone, and I can make bots that troll annoying people that message me on any platform.
Hosting it was super simple, thanks to the Ansible project that's extremely robust and well done, I literally just got a hosting, domain amd changed like 5 config values to enable the bridges I wanted, gave it an IP and ssh key, and ran it. And if I need to update, I literally "just update" (it's all wrapped up into "just" tool), and it eve handles cases where I didn't update for a while, failing graciously and telling me what I need to do maually, usually just rename some config values.
I wholly recommend it. You probably wont convince your friends to switch from <insert app here>, and this is the best compromise.
I'm using a small instance on Hetzner, for 6$ a month. You could in theory get a free oracle cloud instance for it, but I didn't manage to get one.
And you can easily share it with anyone interrested, make them an account, so they can also consolidate their DMs. I'm sharing it with a few friends and colleagues.
You've just made me waste the next 2 days, because this sounds great! Only thing I'm a bit hesitant about is trusting all bridge makers. I'm a bit more aware that I use a lot of FOSS where it could be easy for the dev's to just go rogue. But that's still better than giving it away to some closed source company.
WhenI was setting it up, it took me only like two hours tops. The ansible project is well documented, has a clear setup guide, and the process is really just getting server with ssh access, changing DNS, changing around 5 values in the ansible config and running it.
How do you get around the requirement to run the official app somewhere?
I run a WhatsApp and signal bridge, but not recommend running the official app on a phone
Yeah, that part about WhatsApp is annoying. I just have a spearate profile on Graphene that has only WhatsApp installed, and whenever it wants me to refresh a session I just switch to the profile and log in.
Would you recommend the Discord bridge? I've always wanted to install that as well. Is there anything I want to know before putting in the effort to install and configure it?
- A puppeting (personal account) Discord bridge basically requires your own homeserver. You are trusting the homeserver owner / bridge host fully with your Discord account.
- It is technically against Discord ToS. While I don't think anyone's been banned yet, several people have started receiving warnings that they "spammed", most of them after sending an attachment. These warnings are on your account for 2 years, and could contribute to an account ban.
- Voice chat is not, and probably will not be supported.
- Do NOT bridge a "large" server. You are essentially re-hosting the chats, which can be extremely taxing for large and active Discord servers.
I use mine for a single channel in a "medium-size" server (~2k people), a friend group server, DMs, and a few channels that follow a bunch of announcement channels on other servers.
@[email protected] which discord bridge? For Matrix? The one that operates as a Discord bot works perfectly. Don't know about the ones that want your login token.
As far as I know the Discord bridge has some limitations, the major one being that IIRC it doesn't atually support calls. But just for chatting across servers it has worked well for me.
There's also the fact that you have to either trust the project with your password (as in, the the bridfe adds a matrix bot that runs on your server, but needs your pssword), since I think it uses the web version in the background (but then you can also use it for DMs and any server), or set up a bot on the discord server you want to bridge, which obviously cant be done if you're not an admin. It's a foss project, but there's always a small risk of it gping rogue.
Would you mind sharing the link t the ansible project?
https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
Its pretty well documented and easy to follow, it took me only like an hour to setup.
I'm not OP, but maybe this one?
When I was looking into matrix bridges I heard a bunch of stories about people getting their accounts blocked after using them through the bridges. Is this still an issue?
I've been using it for almost a year by now, and so far I didn't have any problems. I've not considered that problem though, so it might be happening and I was just lucky.
Once in a while discord signs me out and I have to do a bunch of extra sign-in steps on the official client. But otherwise I have discord, WhatsApp, Google voice, Google chat, Google messages (sms), Facebook, telegram, signal.
All the mautrix bridges are will made and robust
There’s a matrix whatsapp bridge??
There is, but it requires you to log into the app every two weeks to maintain a session. You can setup a emulator to do it for you. I just have a separate profile on my Graphene with Only WhatsApp that I switch to and login whenever I get a warning.
Easily set up, and easily attached to other things. Simple notifications about whatever is needed, like service health or updates, new posts on public platforms, etc. A simple
curlis plenty to send and receive notifications, and it works on Android without requiring FCM (Google infrastructure).If you'd permit a short quiz. Ntfy is really interesting to me. I would like to send general server updates and didn't know how to ensure users, just family and friends, get them. I think ntfy could solve that problem, right now I just text and maintain a bookstack document.
I would also like to send user specific notifications though. For example a user requests a show from Jellyseerr, the admin legally obtains said show and uploads it to jellyfin, user then gets notification that the show they requested is available.
Alternative: Gotify
And for those using Matrix, it stops you from having to use Google notifications.
Tangent to this, "Apprise lets you send notifications to a large number of support notification services."
Sadly it doesn't work with CrowdSec which is the biggest thing I would want notifications on (bans and such) and Gotify isn't the pub/sub MQTT-style that I like about ntfy...
I’m a long time Pushover user and recently set it up with CrowdSec.
If a curl is sufficient for ntfy as well, you should be able to adapt the http-plugin.
Ntfy can act as an email server if you configure it. So if an application is not supporting ntfy directly but email, you can go that route. Ntfy will then simply forward the email as push notification. Its also pretty simple to set up, used this as a workaround because authelia doesn't support it directly. Here is the link to the specific ntfy documentation: https://docs.ntfy.sh/config/#e-mail-publishing
I used the local variant (https://docs.ntfy.sh/config/#local-only-email) which does not require any DNS entries, as I only use it for sending notifications between my self hosted containers (all on the same host).
Another alternative: https://pushover.net
I’d say the ARR suite but I knew beforehand that would need it. I just love that I can access overseerr, search up and coming and already out content, click “request”, and then magically it just shows up on my plex after a couple minutes.
A service that I host that I never knew I needed is Nextcloud. Works exactly the way OneDrive worked for me. I record footage on my phone, upload it to Nextcloud, and log onto any computer of mine in the house and can edit the footage. Sometimes I edit footage in VR while I play XPlane, then I’ll save it, turn everything off, and continue right where I left off on my laptop.
Probably super basic but locally syncing things is a godsend to the way I used to do things (KDE connect transfers footage from my phone to a single computer).
Layering on top of that (I'm sorry to recommend a discord app) but, Requestarr is awesome as well. It allows you to attach a bot to a channel and request up through Overseer, Sonarr or Radarr. Works for local and remote users.
PaperlessNGX Syncthing
Paperless is rEally awesome... Scan to folder, it will automatically be sorted and categorized, full text search and one neat thing: It just stores the pdf in subfolders which makes backup also usefull without paperless
I second paperless-ngx. I've gotten rid of almost all paper docs, just scan everything in. It makes taxes so much easier because I can easily filter year to year for comparisons.
Didn't notice OP said this as well.
If you don’t mind me asking, how/on which criteria does auto-sort and -categorization work? Scanning file name and contents? But then you’d have to pre-define some sort of keywords, no?
It's actually quite simple - not sure how it does work under the hood, but take a look at your documents. Every insurance, employer or company has its own letterhead with logo, contact information and legalese. You just tell paperless on one document "hey, that is my insurance, please tag everything like this as insurance" and it will do that.
You can predefine keywords/phrases, yes. But there are many other options. You can tag different documents based on how they wherer ingressed (which e-Mail they came/were sent to from for example). I have it set up so that my scanner has a few different quick action buttons which atomatically upload the documents into different folders (think bills, helthcare, bank, etc.) Then paperless tags and sorts them based on those folders.
I also does machine-learning when enabled which works ok in my experience.
FYI, the repo has been moved and the link is outdated
What was disappointing about wallabag? I have an ebook reader, and Koreader has it integrated into it, and its great.
I found the UI to be horrendous, and managing tags was very painful. During the time I was paying for the cloud-service, there wasn't any noticable development of the web-app, so I stopped using it. Mind you, this was pre-pandemic and things might have changed since then.
https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF
Happens to be more useful than I originally thought.
Would recommend putting a memory limit on the container.
I had it crash my server by eating it all up.What limits do you set on yours?
I've installed it as well but the blackout/redact feature didn't work as expected..So not sure if it will be that useful for me. But since I ditched Adobe, I now at least have a PDF editor.
I installed this at my work. Became pretty popular 😎
Quickly send files, paste images/text snippets between devices.
I'm using the older Snapdrop (which PD was forked from) with some patches I made to:
- Work behind Authelia for SSO + 2FA
- Use the display name provided by Authelia instead of the random usernames it gives out by default
- Send transfers over the internet without dealing with the temporary "rooms" that Pairdrop uses (it's behind Authelia, so only authorized users can get to it).
It has 100% replaced emailing things to myself or shuffling files to/from Nextcloud. I probably use it to send text (URLs, clipboard contents, etc) to/from my phone as much as I use it for sending files back and forth.
I just setup Pairdrop on my home server. Holy crap it's amazing!
Nice! Yeah, I've been a big fan of it. Planning to eventually replace my custom Snapdrop with Pairdrop since they've made quite a few other improvements.
Somehow this one has had eluded me! Thanks for the rec!
https://radicale.org is taking care of our address books, shared calendars for the family, todos and notes, all with one Backend but many different clients on different operating systems.
For low end dum-dums like me, https://sabre.io/baikal/ is a simpler, but very stable caldav solution. I bet Radicale has more features, but did I mention being low end? 🙂
Same thing for me. I couldn’t get radical running and baikal was easy :)
Looks really great. I'm depending on Synology for CalDav and WebDav but if I can move away from that to make switching NAS in the future easier, that would be great.
Jellyseer
Even though I don't have it hooked into an arr stack it is still useful for what is upcoming.
discord bot for my families group chat server. I know it doesn't really mesh well with the mentality of selfhosting but it works for us.
I'm able to do silly stuff like each person getting a 'score' that gets taken down or up when they say something good/bad and people react to it
I have so many shitty little discord bots I've tossed together, I love self hosting them lol
Love that
Y’all get a lot of good use out of Discord?
Why not Matrix via Conduit?
Bump and definitely saving this thread!
Same! Lots of good stuff that’s been mentioned so far, so much to look up and into :D
A clone of 12ft.io but the old version before they got into beef with the New York Times and kneecapped it. It doesn’t work on every single article with a paywall but it works on the overwhelming majority (including New York Times articles)
And it doesn’t really count because I knew I’d use it but komga+komf+fmd2. I list it though because I didn’t realize I’d use this stack so much. I can now read with my phone, my laptop, my ereader, etc. tachiyomi/mihon works, reading progress is synced, and I never have to visit one of those garbage manga aggregation sites ever again
Would you mind sharing links?
oh duh
https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft/blob/main/docker-compose.yaml - this is the 12ft.io replacement i use. there are a few clones but this is the one I like, it's real barebones and uses very little overhead
https://komga.org/ - komga library https://github.com/Snd-R/komf - komf - this isn't strictly necessary but it fetches metadata for your komga library from sites like manga updates. can be a bit of a pain to configure https://github.com/Snd-R/komf-userscript - this is a tampermonkey script that makes komf MUCH easier to use https://github.com/dazedcat19/FMD2 - this is an app that rips manga from most of the "free manga" indexer sites like mangadex, bato, etc. docker and kubernetes version at https://github.com/ElryGH/docker-FMD2
you can read directly via komga web but frankly it kind of sucks for that. i prefer using an app. tachiyomi was the gold standard but companies threatened it and they stopped development. there are several forks now that are all good in various ways. i prefer mihon https://mihon.app/ but there are alternatives that have different feature sets
Man, I read the title and wanted to commebt paperless ngx before reading your post.
https://github.com/Waterboy1602/Addarr
I use this all the time instead of opening Radarr and Sonarr
Isn't this a bit more steps than using Overseer?
It’s more work to set up, but a much easier experience if you have users who can’t remotely access Overseerr. You always have to account for the “mom factor” when hosting services; Will your mom be able to learn how to use it? My mom can use Discord, but good luck getting her to learn Tailscale to access my Overseerr remotely.
The benefit is, I dont need to open a webpage (less data usage or if you are in a slow internet area) or login to a service to add media
Posted above, I'll drop it here as well, requestarr performs the same service but via discord.