5 obscure self-hosted services worth checking out

The world of self-hosting is chock-full of fun and practical projects. However, only a small fraction of these ideas manage to become popular in the community. Once you dig past Pi-hole, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, and other big-name services, you’ll find a truckload of apps that are worth adding to your home lab.

From easy tools that can be deployed with a single command to services that are a bit more cumbersome to set up, here are five of my favorite self-hosted services that deserve more love.

5 Tube Archivist

To save your essential YouTube videos

Ever wanted to index, download, and organize your favorite YouTube videos without relying on ad-riddled websites and third-party apps? Tube Archivist is what you’re looking for. Rather than being an alternative to conventional servers such as Jellyfin, Plex, and Emby, Tube Archivist is more of an add-on service that can be used in tandem with your existing media players.

While it’s easier to set up on proprietary NAS operating systems, home lab owners will need to configure Docker before they can install Tube Archivist. Whether you want your YouTube videos available at all times or are as paranoid about losing access to your favorite channel’s content as I am, you’ll find Tube Archivist a worthwhile addition to your home lab.

4 Tandoor Recipes

A cookbook/meal planner running on your server

With the Internet bursting with unique recipes for you to try out, it can be difficult to keep track of them all. Despite its name, Tandoor Recipes can help you prepare more than just tandoor dishes. Besides allowing you to import your favorite recipes from external websites, apps, and bookmarklets, Tandoor Recipes also comes with an intuitive meal planner to help you organize your cooking (and more importantly) eating habits.

Whether you’re using Docker, Unraid, TrueNAS, Kubernetes, or even HomeAssistant, Tandoor Recipes provides a detailed procedure to self-host this app. But if you’re rocking a Proxmox server, you can use ace developer tteck’s Proxmox VE Helper-Script to self-host Tandoor Recipes.

3 Kiwix

Nothing better than hosting humongous knowledge bases inside tiny SBCs

Unless you’re preparing for the apocalypse, downloading gigabytes worth of educational databases like Wikipedia and TED Talks may sound like an uncanny idea. But if gaining offline access to the largest collection of information tickles your data-hoarding bone, you’d want to check out Kiwix.

I’ll admit that it’s not as obscure as the rest of the services I’ve highlighted in the article. Nevertheless, hosting your own Kiwix server can be a fun little weekend project. Contrary to what you might expect, you don’t need thousands of terabytes of data or high-end systems for a self-hosted Kiwix server; any old Raspberry Pi with a 128GB microSD card should be enough to back up pretty much every Wikipedia article written in English.

2 RomM

To organize (and run) your ripped ROMs

Despite the photorealistic graphics and quality-of-life features of modern gaming, timeless classics from the bygone era still have a lot of charm. But as generations of consoles pass us by, you’re bound to end up with tons of unorganized ROMs. So, if you’re drowning in ISO files and need a convenient tool that can sort your game collection, RomM is your best friend.

Unfortunately, setting it up is an absolute pain, regardless of whether you’re running the GUI version of Docker on Unraid or using the trusty ol’ Docker compose command in the Linux distro of your choice. But RomM is easily worth the trouble, especially since this amazing tool can leverage EmulatorJS to run old-school titles directly on your web browser!

1 Trilium Notes

Your very own self-hosted personal knowledge management

From the paid DEVONthink and Turtl apps to UpNote, Obsidian, and other freemium tools, there’s a lot of competition in the world of note-taking applications. Heck, you can even self-host Joplin if you want more privacy when jotting down your ideas.

However, nothing comes close to Trilium Notes when you need complete control over your personal knowledge base. Pair its robust relationship maps and support for Exceldraw with its powerful note synchronization, snapshots, and encryption features, and Trilium Notes is the only application you’ll ever need to manage your notes. Like Tandoor Recipes, there are tons of ways to set up Trilium – including a convenient Proxmox VE Helper-Script.

Testing fun and intriguing self-hosted apps

Aside from this set of apps, there are myriads of services hidden in the recesses of the self-hosted landscape. For example, Pterodactyl is an amazing game server management tool that’s worth setting up on a Debian (preferably virtual) machine if you love hosting private servers for your favorite multiplayer games.

There’s also SearXNG, a self-hosted search engine, and OpenOffice, a collection of document, presentation, and spreadsheet editors that you can host on your own hardware. Just make sure you manage your ports properly if you wish to run all services on the same Linux distro, or you’ll end up having to edit multiple config files just to avoid port conflicts when testing new containers.