I had been thinking about setting up some kind of NAS system for a while leading up to when I started my self-hosting journey just a few weeks ago. I knew I wanted to reduce my reliance on cloud-hosted third-party services, but everything was very foreign to me and I wasn’t sure I’d get very far.
However, just a few weeks later, I’ve now set up my NAS inside a virtual environment, and within it, I’ve installed a good few apps that I’m in love with. My home server is even more useful than I thought it would be, and I’m very glad I set it up. I have no interest in going back to the way I used to do things, and if you’ve been thinking about making the switch youself, I have some apps I want to recommend that will definitely make this worth your time.
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6
Honorable mentions: Nginx and Tailscale
I can use my NAS apps from anywhere
Before I get to the proverbial meat and potatoes, I did want to touch on Nginx and Tailscale, two essential apps that help make the entire setup worth it. I consider them honorable mentions because, by themselves, these apps aren’t going to do much for you, but what they do offer is a way for you to easily and conveniently access all your NAS services and settings from wherever you are, not just in your home.
Tailscale is something I had already set up before with Home Assistant, and it’s sort of like a personal VPN that creates a tunnel connection from a client device, such as your phone, to an exit node, which in this case, is my TrueNAS instance. This means you can connect to the internal IPs in your network even when you’re not connected to it, which gives you access to all your self-hosted apps.
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Nginx is a reverse proxy, and its benefits are twofold. For one thing, it can help encrypt your connections with an SSL certificate, which is important for certain self-hosted services to work, such as password managers and others that might require a secure connection. But it also makes it easier to access your services with personalized URLs, so you can buy your own custom domain and have something that’s much easier to remember than an IPv4 address. This does mean spending a bit of money, but you can get an obscure enough domain for a very low price and it would still be easy to remember.
5
ConvertX
A file converter that works on every device
Converting files from one format to another is something I don’t have to do as frequently as I used to, but whenever I do need to do it, it’s frustrating. I either have to upload an image to an unknown server, or find a different app depending on the device I’m using. And for someone who tests multiple devices at any given time, installing an app over and over can get pretty tedious.
ConvertX is the perfect solution for this. It’s a relatively simple file converter that supports just about every file type you could reasonably expect. Whether it’s photos, videos, or audio files, you can upload files to your own personal server and have them converted to a format that works on your machine, or someone else’s machine if you need to share it.
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What makes this even better is that you can also configure a file history so that converted files on your server are saved for a set length of time, allowing you to redownload the converted file from any device. This can make it easier to move files across devices with different operating systems, as you can simultaneously convert the file to a more standardized format and make it available to download on any device. I’ve had trouble sharing audio files with other users in the past on some platforms, so I know this is likely to come in handy at some point.
4
Vaultwarden
My own password manager
Password managers are essential these days, and you ought to use one in order to keep all your passwords in one secure place. Truth be told, an online password manager should offer all the security you could ever want, but if you really want to be in full control of your data, a self-hosted password manager is a great solution, and Vaultwarden is perfect for this.
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Vaultwarden is a community-developed self-hosted server for Bitwarden, meaning you can use the official Bitwarden apps and browser extensions to access your passwords on any device, all while keeping that data stored securely on your own server. If you’re setting up Vaultwarden and you want security, you’ll need to be proactive with keeping your server secure, too, but if you do things right, you get absolute security and privacy.
3
Jellyfin
Effortlessly watch my movies and shows
I’m not saying anything that hasn’t already been said with this one, but Jellyfin is truly fantastic if you want to have control over your media. The streaming landscape has become a huge mess due to the large number of services available and the fact that even if you buy some of these movies and shows, you might not be able to watch it on all your devices because of how these digital licenses work.
Jellyfin makes it easy to manage and access your completely legitimate library of movies, TV shows, and other media from basically any device. There are Jellyfin client apps for mobile devices and most TV platforms, making it easy to play these shows on any screen, no matter the size. You can have content in various resolutions, add audio or subtitle tracks, and more, customizing the experience precisely to your needs.
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Best of all, it’s completely free, and it’s very easy to use. It’s one of the easiest self-hosted apps to deploy, and you’ll be ready to go pretty quickly. My library so far is still fairly small, but it’s building up, and it’s great to have access to all these files so easily.
2
Nextcloud
It’s an ecosystem in its own right
Nextcloud is one of the biggest reasons I wanted to set up a NAS in the first place, and after using it, I can say it did not disappoint. At its core, Nextcloud is a cloud storage service, and I’ve moved all of my cloud files to it. With Nginx and Tailscale, I can access these files from anywhere just as I would if I was using a cloud service, and it works really well. On Windows and macOS, you can sync down your content to your computer, so it’s always accessible, and the Windows version even supports on-demand sync similar to OneDrive, so it’s as good as it gets.
The cloud storage alone is great to have and it’s made things much easier for me, but Nextcloud can be as useful as you want thanks to numerous apps of its own. In addition to file management, you can set up your calendar in Nexcloud, and even use it as an email client. I’ve also set up Nextcloud Tasks to manage my to-do lists and sync them across devices.
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My favorite, though, is Nextcloud Office, which can be powered by the built-in CODE server so you can use it entirely within your Nextcloud instance. It lets you edit documents, spreadsheets, and more from any device, and it’s completely free. Most of the edits I need to make are fairly basic, so this has been incredibly helpful for me.
Even with everything I’ve been using, that’s just the tip of the iceberg with Nextcloud and its apps. If you play around with it, there’s so much you can do it make it the ultimate cloud-based tool.
1
Immich
We have Google Photos at home
Nextcloud could store all my photos, and I could even present them nicely with the Memories app, but if you want the best photo storing experience, it has to be Immich. This self-hosted photo and video service is heavily inspired by Google Photos, and it works great. It offers a great way to go through all of your memories with a timeline of when each picture was taken, and you can create albums to highlight specific memories from trips and important events.
Immich feels just like having your own Google Photos service, and it gets surprisingly close to that experience. Everything here looks and feels great, and you can even use some AI to identify and tag people and objects in photos. I love that all my photos are now stored in a single place I can easily access from any of my device, but those images aren’t accessible to a company like Google or Microsoft for whatever purposes they might be used.
Self-hosting has been totally worth it
In my self-hosting journey, I’ve tested a lot more than these services already, but these are the ones that stuck with me so far. I love all of these apps, and I hope to discover even more in the future. Even with just these, though, I already consider this journey to be completely worth the effort (and some headaches).
If you’re someone who’s been considering setting up a NAS to host your own services and files, these should give you a great place to start. They were a perfect starting point for me, so I can heartily recommend them.
#work #I039m #love #selfhosted #services
source: https://www.xda-developers.com/self-hosted-services-now-love/
