A curated list of the software and services I personally use and recommend for building a powerful, local development and deployment environment. This list is aimed at tech individuals looking to get started with self-hosting and exploring the world of homelabbing.
🌐 Live Website: View the interactive version hosted on my homelab infrastructure
- 📖 Documentation: Continue reading this README for detailed project information
- 🌐 Interactive Website: Visit the live website for a social media-style experience
💡 Note: This page is a living document and will be updated as I explore new and exciting projects. This is linked from my LinkedIn profile to showcase the technologies I'm passionate about.
New to homelabbing? Start with these essentials:
- Hardware: Any old computer or a Raspberry Pi 4+
- Hypervisor: Install Proxmox VE for virtualization
- Remote Access: Set up Cloudflare Tunnels for secure external access
- Monitoring: Deploy Uptime Kuma to monitor your services
- Deploy Apps: Use Coolify for easy application deployment
- Core Infrastructure
- DevOps & Automation
- Monitoring & Analytics
- Productivity & Collaboration
- Backend & Data Services
- AI & Development Tools
- Getting Help
Virtualization & Networking - The foundation of your homelab
These tools manage the hardware and provide secure access to your services.
🎯 Purpose: Hypervisor for running VMs and containers
💰 Cost: Free
⚡ Difficulty: Beginner-friendly
Proxmox Virtual Environment is a powerful, open-source hypervisor that allows you to run virtual machines (VMs) and lightweight Linux Containers (LXC). It's the bedrock of my homelab, providing a robust and easy-to-manage platform for all my other services.
Why I use it:
- Free with excellent web UI
- Supports both VMs (full OS isolation) and LXC containers (lightweight Linux services)
- Built-in backup and clustering capabilities
Key Features:
- KVM for VMs
- LXC for containers
- Built-in backup solutions
- Clustering support
- Comprehensive web-based management interface
- no subcription repo
🔗 Resources: Official Website | Installation Guide | no subcription repo
🎯 Purpose: Secure remote access without port forwarding
💰 Cost: Free tier available
⚡ Difficulty: Intermediate
Cloudflare Tunnels create a secure, outbound-only connection between your local services and the Cloudflare network. This allows you to expose your homelab applications to the internet without opening any ports on your firewall.
Why I use it:
- Much more secure than traditional port forwarding
- Includes Cloudflare's DDoS protection and caching
- No need to configure firewall rules
🔗 Resources: Getting Started Guide
Platform-as-a-Service tools for easy deployment
Tools that make deploying and managing applications a breeze.
🎯 Purpose: Self-hosted alternative to Heroku/Vercel
💰 Cost: Free (open-source)
⚡ Difficulty: Beginner-friendly
Coolify is an open-source and self-hostable alternative to Heroku, Netlify, and Vercel. It allows you to deploy applications, databases, and other services with just a few clicks.
Why I use it:
- Dramatically simplifies deployment process
- Automatic builds from GitHub repositories
- Handles SSL certificates automatically
- Supports multiple programming languages and frameworks
🔗 Resources: GitHub | Documentation
🎯 Purpose: Workflow automation platform
💰 Cost: Free (open-source) / Paid (cloud)
⚡ Difficulty: Beginner-friendly
n8n is a powerful, open-source workflow automation tool that allows you to connect different services and automate repetitive tasks. It's like Zapier but self-hosted, giving you complete control over your automation workflows.
Why I started with n8n:
- Perfect entry point into self-hosting
- Visual workflow builder makes automation accessible
- Connects to hundreds of different services
- Great for learning API integrations
- Excellent documentation and community
Key Features:
- Visual workflow editor
- 400+ integrations
- Custom code nodes for advanced logic
- Webhook support for real-time triggers
- Built-in credential management
🔗 Resources: GitHub | Documentation | Community
Keep track of your services and data
Essential tools for monitoring service health and understanding usage patterns.
🎯 Purpose: Service uptime monitoring
💰 Cost: Free (open-source)
⚡ Difficulty: Beginner-friendly
A beautiful, easy-to-use, self-hosted monitoring tool. Uptime Kuma can monitor your services over HTTP/S, TCP, DNS, and other protocols. It sends notifications through various channels like Slack, Discord, and Telegram if a service goes down.
Why I use it:
- Incredibly simple to set up
- Clean, at-a-glance dashboard
- Multiple notification channels
- Supports various monitoring protocols
🎯 Purpose: Privacy-friendly web analytics
💰 Cost: Free (self-hosted) / Paid (cloud)
⚡ Difficulty: Intermediate
A lightweight, open-source, and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. It provides all the essential website traffic metrics without collecting any personal data.
Why I use it:
- Privacy-focused (no personal data collection)
- Lightweight and fast
- GDPR compliant out of the box
- Clean, intuitive interface
🔗 Resources: GitHub | Self-hosting Guide
Documentation, knowledge management, and AI tools
Tools for organizing information and enhancing productivity.
🎯 Purpose: Local LLM interface
💰 Cost: Free (open-source)
⚡ Difficulty: Intermediate
OpenWebUI is a user-friendly and feature-rich web interface for local Large Language Models (LLMs) like Llama, CodeLlama, and Mistral. It provides a ChatGPT-like experience for your self-hosted AI models.
Why I use it:
- Best interface for local LLMs
- Supports multiple AI models
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) capabilities
- ChatGPT-like user experience
- Complete privacy (runs locally)
🔗 Resources: GitHub | Documentation
🎯 Purpose: Team documentation and wiki
💰 Cost: Free (open-source)
⚡ Difficulty: Beginner-friendly
An open-source, self-hosted alternative to Confluence for team documentation and knowledge sharing.
Why I use it:
- Clean, modern interface
- Real-time collaboration
- Markdown support
- Organized document structure
- Great for technical documentation
🔗 Resources: GitHub | Documentation
Powerful database and backend solutions
Self-hostable backends and databases for your applications.
🎯 Purpose: Open-source Firebase alternative
💰 Cost: Free (self-hosted) / Paid tiers (cloud)
⚡ Difficulty: Intermediate
Supabase is an open-source alternative to Firebase. It provides a suite of tools to build your backend, including a Postgres database, authentication, instant APIs, storage, and more.
Why I use it:
- All the power of Firebase with self-hosting flexibility
- Built on rock-solid PostgreSQL
- Instant REST and GraphQL APIs
- Built-in authentication and authorization
- Real-time subscriptions
- File storage capabilities
🔗 Resources: GitHub | Self-Hosting Guide | Official Website
AI-powered development and content management
Tools that enhance development workflow and content creation.
🎯 Purpose: Headless CMS for content management
💰 Cost: Free (Community Edition)
⚡ Difficulty: Intermediate
Strapi is a leading open-source headless CMS that is 100% JavaScript, fully customizable, and developer-first. Perfect for building APIs and managing content for AI applications or tech blogs.
Why I use it:
- Incredibly flexible for custom APIs
- Define custom data structures easily
- Both REST and GraphQL APIs
- Great admin panel
- Perfect backend for content-driven projects
- Extensive plugin ecosystem
🔗 Resources: GitHub | Docker Installation Guide | Official Website
🎯 Purpose: AI-powered code completion
💰 Cost: Paid subscription
⚡ Difficulty: Beginner-friendly
While not a self-hosted project, GitHub Copilot is an indispensable tool in my developer workflow. It's an AI pair programmer that offers autocomplete-style suggestions as you code.
Why I recommend it:
- Significantly speeds up development
- Reduces boilerplate code writing
- Excellent for learning new languages and frameworks
- Context-aware suggestions
- Supports multiple programming languages
🔗 Resources: Official Website | Getting Started
- r/selfhosted - Active Reddit community for self-hosting enthusiasts
- r/homelab - Hardware and infrastructure discussions
- Awesome-Selfhosted - Comprehensive list of self-hosted services
- Most projects have active GitHub issues and discussions
- Many have Discord/Matrix communities
- Documentation is usually excellent for the recommended tools
- Minimum: Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB RAM) or equivalent
- Recommended: Old desktop/laptop with 8GB+ RAM
- Enterprise: Dedicated server hardware or cloud VPS
For a more engaging way to explore this homelab journey:
- 🔗 Live Website: your-domain.com
- 📱 Mobile-Friendly: Optimized social media-style interface
- 🎮 Interactive: Click through projects, resources, and documentation
The companion website is built with:
- Framework: Next.js 14 with TypeScript
- Styling: Tailwind CSS
- Deployment: Self-hosted via Coolify
- Infrastructure: Running on my Proxmox homelab
cd website
npm install
npm run devVisit http://localhost:3000 to see the website locally.
- Repository: Connect this GitHub repo to Coolify
- Build Path: Set to
website/ - Build Command:
npm run build - Output Directory:
out/ - Environment: Node.js 18+
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💬 Questions or suggestions? Feel free to open an issue or reach out on LinkedIn.