What's running in my homelab?

I started my homelab journey years ago with a single second-hand HP ProLiant N40L server that I bought on eBay, experimenting with basic setups and learning as I went. Over time, I’ve focused on self-hosting more and relying less on public services, gradually expanding my hardware and running more ambitious projects.

In this post, I’ll highlight the most-used services in my homelab. These are the ones my friends, family, and I rely on the most or find the most valuable, in no particular order. In future posts, I’ll cover my setup in more detail, from the foundation to the applications I use.

1. Nextcloud

This one is pretty obvious—Nextcloud is the de facto standard self-hosted cloud platform for homelab owners. It offers a versatile solution for file storage, syncing, and sharing, along with a wide range of additional features. Its flexibility and strong community support make it an essential choice for anyone looking to take control of their data.

Nextcloud handles a lot for me: it serves as my default cloud file storage and sharing platform, acts as a backend for contacts and calendars, manages my project planning, functions as a collaborative to-do manager, includes a powerful office suite, it’s integrated with my favourite diagram drawing application, and features an excellent photo gallery. I also rely on it for instant messaging and videoconferencing, use it extensively for markdown notes (coupled with Obsidian), and even allow others to schedule appointments with me through it. All of this is easily accessible to me whether I’m at home, traveling, using someone else’s computer, or on my smartphone—you get the idea.

2. Vaultwarden

Vaultwarden is an unofficial Bitwarden server implementation written in Rust. It’s incredibly lightweight, resource-efficient, and simple to deploy. Vaultwarden offers most of the functionality of the official Bitwarden service, enabling you to securely store and manage passwords, login credentials, and other sensitive information, all while giving you full control over your data—without the need for licensing or dealing with .NET/Mono shenanigans.

3. Zipline

Zipline is a feature-packed image and file upload server built with Next.js and React. It is a self-hosted alternative for tools like imgur, wetransfer, bitly and pastebin. You can use it to host and share pictures, files, text snippets and to shorten URLs (if you happen to own a short domain name, that is).

It’s designed to be fast, easy to use, and straightforward to deploy, making it an excellent solution for anyone needing a reliable and customizable file upload server. It can be easily integrated with ShareX and Flameshot making screenshot management and sharing a breeze.

4. Home Assistant

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that focuses on privacy and local control. It integrates with an enormous range of devices and services, allowing you to control smart lights, security systems, climate controls, you name it, all from a single interface.

What sets Home Assistant apart is its flexibility and wide integration options, all running locally on your network for better privacy and security. It’s highly customizable with support for scripting, automations, and custom components, making it an ideal choice for creating a reliable, self-hosted smart home setup.

5. Firefly III

Firefly III is an open-source personal finance manager that helps you keep track of your expenses, incomes, and budgets. Designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind, it offers an intuitive interface for organizing your financial data and gaining insights into your spending habits.

What sets Firefly III apart is its self-hosted nature, giving you full control over your financial data. It also has a great API backend allowing integration with third-party applications (like Waterfly III or Abacus for Android) for on-the-go expense tracking.

6. FreePBX

FreePBX is a powerful, open-source PBX system that allows you to create a fully functional VoIP phone system for your home or business. Built on top of Asterisk, FreePBX provides a web-based interface to manage calls, extensions, voicemail, and other telephony features.

Besides connecting it to a SIP trunk for making and receiving calls, FreePBX also works well as an intercom system. For example you can connect it to a couple VoIP phones and place internal calls between floors or manage a SIP-enabled doorbell system.

7. Uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma is an open-source monitoring tool that helps you track the availability of your services. It provides a simple, user-friendly dashboard to monitor your servers, websites, and other endpoints.

With support for protocols like HTTP(s), TCP, and ICMP, Uptime Kuma allows you to easily set up monitoring checks and receive alerts if anything goes down. It also integrates very nicely with Home Assistant, allowing it to take actions based on the status of your services. As a nice bonus feature it enables you to create public service status dashboards to share with users of your homelab.

8. FreshRSS and Wallabag

FreshRSS is an open-source RSS feed aggregator that lets you collect and read content from your favorite websites in one convenient place. It’s lightweight, easy to deploy, and highly customizable, making it a great solution for self-hosting your own feed reader.

Wallabag is an open-source read-it-later service that allows you to save and organize articles from the web. It lets you store content for offline reading and presents it in a clean, readable format. Wallabag supports importing from various services like Pocket, and you can tag, search, and organize your saved articles.

Together, these two applications offer a powerful combination for managing and consuming web content. While FreshRSS serves as a comprehensive feed reader, Wallabag allows you to save and archive articles for later reading, ensuring that no interesting content slips through the cracks.

9. BookStack

BookStack is an open-source multi-user knowledge management platform designed to help you organize and share information in a simple, hierarchical structure. It offers a clean and intuitive interface, making it easy to create and manage books, chapters, and pages of content.

BookStack is ideal for creating wikis, manuals, or personal documentation. It supports rich text editing, image embedding, and markdown, allowing you to organize your knowledge in a way that makes sense to you.

Honorable mentions: the backend(s)

The backbone of my homelab relies on a few self-hosted systems that keep everything running smoothly behind the scenes.

At the core of my setup is a pfSense based firewall, which manages network traffic, with HAProxy ensuring smooth load balancing. My OpenLDAP stack handles authentication and access control.

For storage, my TrueNAS NAS stores and shares data with redundancy, ensuring it’s always accessible and backed up while Proxmox gives me the power to quickly spin up and manage virtual machines and containers, allowing me to test different configurations or run VulnHub VMs without needing additional physical hardware.