Hi everybody, I wrote this piece and it might seem a little half-baked, but I’ll never get it going if I don’t throw it out there.
Let me know what you think, thanks and selfhosting ftw.
I buy it.
As it turns out, a couple of months ago when a laptop crapped out at an inopportune time, I needed to retreat to a much older machine with barely enough memory to keep a browser running all day. As I tried to work out a recovery plan for the things that didn’t seem properly backed up (they were, just not where I expected them), I remembered that I had a couple of old Raspberry Pi units that I never did much with, and decided that could take the load off of the laptop if I tossed them in the corner.
So far, I have Code Server to substitute for Visual Studio Code, Cryptpad for Libre Office, Forgejo just because I really should have done that a long time ago, Fresh RSS for a rotating list of RSS readers since I dropped my Internet-accessible Tiny Tiny RSS installation, Inf Cloud and Radicale for a calendar/address book, Jellyfin that used to run on the then-in-use old laptop, Snappy Mail for Thunderbird and the bunch of heavy webpages from mail providers, YaCy because I’ve wanted to use it more for many years, and a few others.
Moving onto a more functional computer, I decided to keep the servers running, because the setup works about as well as the desktop setups that I’ve run for years, if I use a few pinned tabs. I’m sure that I’ll scream about it when something goes wrong, but it does the job…
ive been going back to basics the last few years after years of messing around with self hosted stuff for a while. i just like the simplicity of the files being local and not worrying about logins or needing to be iconnected to my home network or needing remote access etc.
plain text markdown files for note taking. keepass for passwords, which is just a single file. instead of using jellyfin to watch movies i usually just open a file browser. m3u playlists for listening to music with mpv. then syncthing for syncing all that between devices.
something i want to do soon is to run Radicale/calDAV locally on each device and then have syncthing sync the changes instead of needing every device to talk to a central calDAV server. DecSync is another option for this kind of thing i think
for bookmark syncing im currently using Floccus with the webDAV server thats running on my synology, but i would like get that webDAV server running locally with syncthing at some point as well
mainly if its something that i use daily i want to try and get the files to always be stored locally, then other things that i might only use 2 or 3 times i week i dont mind doing self hosted stuff
I also love the “files over app” approach, I am doing it more and more for simple stuff like (habit-) tracking. With the tempo that applications become outdated or even obsolete, I think this is something very powerful.
I think your radicale/caldav approach is interesting. Would you then also run radicale on your phone? Or simply not have the calendar on your phone? Would syncthing only sync in your home network too?
There are a few apps that I think fit this use case really well.
Languagetool is a spelling and grammer checker that has a server client model. Libreoffice now has built in languagetool integration, where it can acess a server of your choosing. I make it access the server I run locally, since archlinux packages languagetool.
Another is stirling-pdf. This is a really good pdf manipulation program that people like, that comes as a server with a web interface.
Thanks, I’ll check languagetool. stirling pdf already has a desktop client, although I don’t know if it offers the same functionality (but I would expect it).
My initial reaction was basically one of your headlines - “Desktop apps with extra steps”. But I guess you are right that selfhosted apps are often better than plain desktop apps. Interesting idea in general.
A cool thing to have with this would be backups, designed in a way that makes it easy to manually back up on a USB drive. Not necessarily automated, but maybe with automatic reminders “You didn’t back up your data in X days - Backup now - Close”.
Thanks, I thought about backups/snapshots too, especially snapshots before version updates, such that users can always jump back if something goes wrong.
Not sure how many services can be hosted in that way and remain useful. But it’s an interesting idea overall! For myself, I could run a Git forge on local PC. Since I’m the only user, and I just keep my scripts there, it is fine not to run 24/7.
I really like the idea.
syncthing is a strong recommendation for this. Itll start manually on my host. and then simply sync my files semiautomatically whithout the need of having to run my rpi all the time especially if I still use it to experiment.
Nice, thanks for the syncthing use case.
Great idea, i really hope we see more of that type of local/selfhosting for average folks, its really the only way to save the internet from just being another corporate censorship heavy advertising platform.
As a non technical person, I think any tool that would make local hosting easier for laypeople like myself is great! I hope everything works out for you and localhostinger becomes a thing. I particularly like the “The app store idea” version a lot!
I’m a bit of a nerd but kubernetes was way too much for me. Currently I use dokploy on a raspberry pi which has a growing list of “recipes” in a “store”. It does a lot of the heavy lifting in the background and has a pretty selfexplanatory web gui.
It really helped me to starting my selfhosting journey by slowly dipping my toes and going a bit deeper each time. Might be worth checking it out. Sorry if this reads like an ad, I just really like it …
I’m a professional software engineer and I’ve been in the industry since before Kubernetes was first released, and I still found it overwhelming when I had to use it professionally.
I also can’t think of an instance when someone self-hosting would need it. Why did you end up looking into it?
I use Docker Compose for dozens of applications that range in complexity from “just run this service, expose it via my reverse proxy, and add my authentication middleware” to “in this stack, run this service with my custom configuration, a custom service I wrote myself or forked, and another service that I wrote a Dockerfile for; make this service accessible to this other service, but not to the reverse proxy; expose these endpoints to the auth middleware and for these endpoints, allow bypassing of the auth middleware if an API key is supplied.” And I could do much more complicated things with Docker if I needed to, so even for self-hosters with more complex use cases than mine, I question whether Kubernetes is the right fit.
Why did you end up looking into it?
Cause people online kept saying that one should use it in their homelab. It’s mentioned in basically every such post and there are a lot of videos about rpi clusters with k3s. So I assumed it’s the way to go.
I basically do the same as you but with Dokploy cause the web ui makes it easier to manage than juggling ssh terminals and remote editing textfiles in an editor from the 19th century.
There’s a use case for this but who knows how big this niche is, and ultimately that’s what will determine success or failure.
this is self-hosting local-first apps. There’s some local-first manifesto somewhere… one of their greatest ‘backend’ developments were CRDTs. The idea, is that the app can be turned off, synchronization can be interrupted and resumed, and so on. Those CRDTs allow people to use a text editor even when the client(s) are disconnected from the server. Of course, depending on how much your version differs, the merge conflict of diverging versions will be easier to solve…
Thanks for that input, I have to look deeper into it. It seems to me that their idea is an approach you choose during software development, while localhosting is about hosting somebody else’s software that’s already out and probably does not include these local-first principles.
