Self-Hosted & Open Source

Guides for running your own services instead of renting them from hyperscalers. Covers Nextcloud for file sync, Jellyfin for media, Vaultwarden for passwords, Gitea for version control, and dozens of other open source platforms that replace the subscription stack most people default to. Every guide includes the Docker Compose file, the reverse proxy config, the backup approach, and the failure modes we have hit in production. Self-hosting is not about paranoia. It is about owning the infrastructure your life runs on, understanding how it works, and keeping your data under your own roof. If you want sovereignty over your digital life, this is the practical path.

Circuit breaker panel with wires, most switches off - capability wired but not switched on

I Deployed a Self-Hosted RMM, Decided It Was Limited, and Was Completely Wrong

Nobody needs an RMM in a homelab. My estate is managed with Ansible, and seventeen Linux hosts do not need remote monitoring and management on top of that. I deployed NetLock RMM at the end of last year anyway, out of curiosity, and because it is privacy-focused and European it sits on the same shelf

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Editorial card: Project NOMAD, self-hosted internet in a box

Project NOMAD: Offline Wikipedia, Maps and a Local AI

A weekend rabbit hole worth sharing. I stumbled across Project NOMAD a few days ago. It’s an open-source bundle (Apache 2.0, runs in Docker) that puts the useful parts of the internet on a mini-PC or any spare x86 box. The first thing that surprised me was that I’d never heard of it. The second

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Terminal showing docker ps output with multiple homelab containers running

10 Docker Commands Every Homelab Admin Should Know

The Commands That Actually Matter Docker has over 50 commands. You’ll use about 10 of them regularly. The rest are either for building images, managing swarm clusters, or edge cases you’ll look up once a year. This guide covers the 10 commands I run most frequently across six Docker hosts, with the flags I actually

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Terminal showing docker compose up command deploying a multi-container stack

Docker Compose for Beginners: A Practical Guide

The docker-compose.yml used in this guide (copy-paste ready). What Docker Compose Actually Is (and Isn’t) Docker Compose is a way to define and run multi-container applications using a single YAML file. Instead of typing out long docker run commands with a dozen flags, you describe what you want in a file called docker-compose.yml and run

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