Indeed. The other thing to point out is that, once you have set them up, they will chug along fine for years with near zero input.

Here is the stack I recommend:

* Radarr (movies) with optional second instance for 4K versions

* Sonarr (shows) with optional second instance for 4K versions

* Sonarr (anime), separate instance to have control over quality settings

* Prowlarr (tracker/indexer management)

* SABnzbd (Usenet)

* qBittorrent (torrents)

I would also recommend consulting the TRaSH guide to tune your setup and ensure you’re grabbing quality releases. From there, the next logical step is Profilarr :)

In this day of vibeslop, it's insane no one thinks to combine all these into single app. The best we can do is having single docker compose file that has to manually point each service into each other.

A single dream app that combines: Media server, crawler, downloader, subtitle, cloudflare bypass etc, with plugin support.

There's been two major disruptions in my experience.

First was Lidarr went for months last year (was it this year?) unable to search/add musicians due to complications with how they were relaying those searches. It took them a long time to refactor that part of the software and make it usable again.

Second was the retirement of Readarr, the ebook-version of this software, which was an absolute shame.

But aside from that this is pretty much set-and-forget software. Although the setting is harder than it should be, should be much easier to favour smallest x265 rips at <resolution>, lossless audio, season rips with subtitles.

I've been running my instances for over 5 years, I update the Dockers every few months and that's it. I have about five users in different households that rely on it it has never missed a beat.

I think it just sounds intimidating if one hasn't tried, but they are really well designed pieces of software, that are relatively simple to set up (just have to go through the motions and connect everything with API keys).

Highly recommend them to OP. My stack went down once in the past 4 years and it was my fault.

I build my own version, single binary that does every thing. While I built it, I learned I cannot make it open source or distribute, bc it might be illegal to do so, so I assume many people have built that, but you're always locked into the narrowly scoped lego pieces. So I enjoy my media now, without hassles, all the features I need, none I don't. I hope one day I get to share.

Maybe the resources in question arent RAM.

Another good option is nixflix: https://github.com/kiriwalawren/nixflix (a nixos equivalent)

Oh cool! I have been running it happily for a bit over a year but found the interplay to be annoying. Currently working on https://github.com/tclancy/lintarr to try to "prove" rules across the stack don't conflict with each other.

The bigger reason is Sonarr and Radarr opens you up to a plethora of attack vectors and realistically at this point you're probably already compromised.

> Sonarr, Lidarr, Radarr

There’s no value to this post honestly.

There must be large amounts of similar code between Radarr, Lidarr, Sonarr etc.

Whenever I use them I wonder if they could be one unified app with plugins...?

Also the barrier to entry for these things has dropped immensely with ai

Hey that's pretty neat. Thanks for making and sharing.

> Ok, I respect your opinion, but remember that there are poor souls like me out there that actually love the opposite.

All things being equal, why prefer Docker Compose? From my perspective, a single binary strictly dominates any Docker Compose solution.

Agreed and everyone’s talking about Docker Compose while I’m putting everything in k8s.

Same here, just give me a compose file and lets go!

A big reason I chose Rust and Sqlite for my project was that end users could just run the small binary and be done with it. https://github.com/sergiotapia/joyscroller

I think you can go very very far with this kind of setup especially if it's just for you.

Immich uses postgres because it relies on VectorChord for smart search.

It's what powers the ability to search your photos for "a dog on a beach".

It's also a fairly sensible decision.

I would rather keep things on postgres but everything wanting its own postgres container is really annoying. Postgres already has support for multiple databases, users, and access controls. I would personally prefer to just set up one postgres instance with proper backups and have everything run against that, unfortunately some self-hosting projects have fairly poor support for that.

> several things each wanted their own Postgres container. Immich wants a Postgres and a redis instance.

Those things are dirt cheap. A Postgres container on my machine uses 200MB of memory. Redis is nearly free. It's a small price to pay to not have services cross paths with each other and mucking everything up.

SQLite has a bunch of cool stuff happening around it right now too like Turso and Litestream.

How do backups work with SQLite? Postgres is nice in that it can run them live without any corruption issues for writes in the middle of the backup.

My experience with this is that all of the projects that are worthwhile, continue to grow and then at some point some kind of bottleneck is hit. Migrations become slow or overly complicated, lookups start taking forever, etc and the app just starts to slowly become unusable the more you try to use it.

You end up in a situation where you are following some complex guide (hopefully written by the actual developer) where you make a huge backup, have to tear everything down, and then hope the migration from SQLite or MariaDB doesn't hit any issues. Postgres is heavier but at the scales of self hosting it should not matter on any modern system. Multiple docker containers even on a Pi isn't something you have to worry about. Solutions like Immich are usually run on a NAS where there would never be an issue

> Self-hosting email fully is tedious/unnecessary

Certainly not unnecessary if you care about privacy and Google not reading your mail.

Is it tedious? Not really for someone with a basic command of Linux and computer networking. Even in the pre-AI days, it only took me an afternoon to set up Postfix/Dovecot, and a few more days to refine various aspects of the setup and to write a bash script that can rebuild the whole thing on a new machine. There is basically no ongoing maintenance at all. The Dovecot syntax changed in Debian 13, and Claude translated the old config file in less than a minute. If you are willing to use a Dockerized solution, it's even less work, but I personally like to run this kind of thing bare metal and control every aspect of the setup.

"Self-hosting email fully is tedious/unnecessary"

If you IT, why do you particularly consider self hosting email as tedious?

You can do this with Proton?? How does it handle decryption/encryption, etc?

Would absolutely love to do this, proton frontend annoys me at times.

I got a VHS player and a load of free tapes. It hasn't changed since I was young (well they've degraded a little), so if I enjoyed it then I can enjoy it as well now. In some things I try to resist a little the encroachment of higher standards.

But not in everything. I can't drink a cheap scotch.

The difference between a 4K bluray encode by pirates who care, and a 4K WEB-DL from Netflix and co, is simply staggering.

It's been really interesting seeing the divide in the comments! I have a completely different philosophy from the OP on how to self host haha, and it comes from not wanting to fiddle with my server all the time! But they say our ci/cd is fiddly! The whole point of it is to NOT be fiddly! People gotta start figuring out how things work instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall.

In my experience, when something involves words like "declarative", "deployment", "docker", "k8s", that's a sign that it will actually involve more fiddling rather than less. But that's just me.

Do you not consider systemd services to be declarative/standard?

I agree. But you could easily automate the systemd/podman based setup the OP has using ansible, if you wanted a declarative approach using OP's tools.

For my part, my home server is a single compose file :shrug:

Pets are OK sometimes! They do need care and feeding, though; some of us don't see that as chores, instead delightful hobbies. I can definitely see the perspective of "there are better things to do", especially if you don't like those things.

Especially now when you can snap your fingers and get a semi responsible codified version. Heck just do what you want to them ask the LLM to port your work to something marginally better than a totally hand cobbled bucket of bits system.

Wireguard is relatively simple. The VPN on my phone automatically connects when I disconnect from my home wifi, then it's like I'm at home.

What tools did you create yourself?

This, but plain Wireguard instead of Tailscale. This assumes you have a public IP. But you can't do true self-hosting without one.

foobar's rock solid. I have a portable copy on a mounted NAS share and it's great for transcoding and being an ad hoc music player while setting up new computers

I run Adguard on my router, not on my server. I did write a subsequent post about the rest of the stuff I run on my router and my Proxmox cluster, but forgot to mention Adguard.

Dns4eu is free, has adblocking, and you can deploy it right now.

Never tried it myself but I’d be afraid of stuff being randomly broken. Eg at some point pi-hole made YouTube history not work.

This. Or just buy an N100 motherboard (Asrock makes one) and put it in a standard ATX case with a proper cooler, power supply, and enough space for expansion cards and hard drives etc. Maybe you will want a GPU in the future, even if it is unncessary now. Small nonstandard form factors always come back to bite you sooner or later. It's better not to cut corners and build something modular.

I have the opposite experience. Plex, nextcloud, minecraft servers, and ~10 websites are all hosted on a Beelink N100. It stays cool and quiet.

Most likely something wrong with the cooler, maybe it's not making proper contact with the CPU. Should be repairable if you give it a try, but yes, the used thin clients are higher quality.

Just another data point, I got a Beelink S13 Pro N150 running similar things as OP and haven't had any issues. I made changes in BIOS (set "Chipset > PCH-IO > State After G3" to S0 so it boots up again after regaining power) and they are sticking for me.

As long as you can use one instance of Postgresql. There's another comment thread here[1] about each thing wanting its own Postgresql container.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50111944

8 years to now may not be indicative of what's to come.

People with script-kiddie level skills now have access to nation-state level attack expertise via LLM.

I'm a big fan of Tailscale

With some small systemd configs each native app is essentially a container these days. The overhead of unique kernels per app would really restrict what could fit on a small box like this

DynamicUser and ProtectSystem keep me sane.

Use the DNS-01 challenge.

I considered KeePass+ Synching but tended to run into the same issues as with Owntracks - Android is hostile to always on background apps. Then when it came time to onboard my spouse, KeePass wasn't an option.

My go-to for low power consumption is a Chromebook running some vanilla flavor of Linux. I have some HP units that will run for almost a day on battery with the lid closed. $25<$250.

yeah, they make a great homelab, especially with a fast external drive or 4

They might have to turn on/off some lights using the buttons on the smart switch, yes. Or maybe lose access to Jellyfin for a while. But on whole things have been pretty reliable.

I used to have my server publicly facing, but now I use Caddy with automatic DNS challenges.

You can automatically renew through DNS challenge?

Podman + systemd is how I run production workloads at work.

For us it's the perfect balance between simplicity, observability (Beszel) and reliability. Not the right tool if you have dynamic workloads but definitely the right tool for boring and predictable workloads.

At home I run K3S, it's awesome. It also breaks a lot and does add a whole bunch of complexity that I would only recommend if you enjoy tinkering and fixing things.

I prefer docker containers (on proxmox VMs), but that could just be the familiarity of a few years experience talking. It does add some distance from 'bare metal' but it also makes backup/restore, and therefore portability, quite simple. I backup both the VMs and the 'persistent' container data that I always create dedicated volumes for, so I have a couple of different avenues and granularity for restoring.

There's nothing else out there, that I know of, that offers improvements on any kind of scale that it would be worth my migrating to.

I do hear good things about podman, so if I was starting from scratch I'd look into that. I have one podman instance running UnifiOS, but that's only because there's no official docker compose from Ubiquiti (and maybe that's telling in itself). Podman feels more opaque to me than docker, but I have years under docker and essentially zero under podman.

I personally use NixOS and a mix of systemd services and Quadlet-Nix for the few containers that have too many dependencies and moving parts. Works well.

My server is running on NixOS and I went with systemd containers - really happy with my setup. It was not at all difficult to set it up with Claude

Currently testing out FreeBSD jails, but with OCI images and Podman :)

https://daemonless.io

BastilleBSD is another great way to run FreeBSD+jails using their templates

https://bastillebsd.org/projects/bastillebsd/

https://github.com/BastilleBSD/templates

Container manager on Synology. Don't have much choice. Some stuff can run native but it's easier to run containers.

The big issue with Synology is the really crappy db logs driver they use. If a container has been running for a while it takes an age to see the logs via the Web UI.

There is a solution though: https://github.com/telnetdoogie-labs/synology-docker

There are really easy to user docker app managers out there. The author says 'I already use systemd'. I mean, I guess I'm using systemd, but really I'm using e.g. runtipi with an app store, web-based config and logging, and a super easy app template. I can point claude at any project with a docker release and in a couple minutes have it show up in my app store to install, run, simple data backups, etc.

For me, I say it depends on the service. I use Coolify for docker apps usually smaller apps, and LXC when docker won't cut it for whatever reason.

Personally I use docker with portainer to handle the stacks/containers, have done for many years. I like it.

Yes. NixOS running Podman containers is where I ended up after trying almost everything :)

Docker containers are fine. I've moved between 5 NAS' over the years and docker has enabled it to be seemless.

rsync data directories. docker compose up. Done.

On the consumer or even prosumer nas products which have a semi-locked down system (ie Truenas/qnap/Synology). Technically you have root but as soon as you update the OS all/most of the changes end up being broken. Yes you could probably do something and deal with it. But personally I've spent too long babysitting it on the first and second nas that I no longer care.

Yes, especially if you running a multi-node setup. I'm still running on HashiCorp Nomad.

Why not have your cake and eat it too with quadlets?

For several years, Docker with portainer

Most of the time projects provide a ready to use compose file. I use dockge that provides a simple web interface for compose configs, so just paste in the compose file there and run it.

I self host (I have a large overlap with the services in TFA), and love it. I will never go back and think that more people should self host (or at least...join small groups of people who designate one person to manage it for a small number of people).

And believing that the current AI economy might have a period of rapid devaluation in the near future is pretty reasonable. But, much like the original .com bubble, the idea that AI as a technology will not survive and thrive through such a pop, and become an ever more important part of our future, is a belief that I can't comprehend. Anthropic and OpenAI very well may go belly up. AI as a technology isn't going anywhere.

And as much as I'd like to believe that more people may self host more things in the future, self hosting will never, even if it was adopted by literally everyone, become as big a deal as AI, even if AI hit a wall tomorrow and didn't get any better than the current frontier models.

Self hosting has never been easier and I imagine the average person has never been further from trying it. No one will ever get anywhere close to hosting this much sruff

> Self hosting is the real disruptive future.

Self-hoster reporting in.

I got into it about a year ago. Bought a refurbished old Dell mini PC for 300 bucks and turned it into a home server. Debian + several docker containers.

I don't know if this is the future, but it feels disruptive. I think it is amazing that I can run my private home streaming service alongside a bunch of other cool things on old hardware and the experience is in many ways superior to actual services that I am charged to use.

Fair, I just never use the web clients. I mainly use the Android phone or TV apps, which do support H.265. The Android TV subtitle support seemed ok, I think I did have issues with the Roku app and subtitles.

I understand use cases for Jellyfin and selfhost it myself for music (in combination with incredible Finamp[1]), but for movies/shows plain MiniDLNA[2] works like a charm and is accessible from any device.

[1]: https://github.com/finamp-app/finamp

[2]: https://minidlna.com/

I used jellyfin-mpv-shim. You select what to play from any ui and it starts playing in mpv, which seems to have excellent support for everything you would want a player to do.

Same, Covid was a great time to spend shifting things from clouds to home. I have a small fleet of Pi4's and 1 newer 5 (for running Omada locally). Cost has shifted from subscriptions ($$$) to maintenance (time) :)

I use both Restic and Syncthing. I have considered putting encrypted backups on a cloud blob storage, but my preference would be to set up an offsite backup at a relative's house.

I use restic to create encrypted snapshots on external cloud storage for the data I care about. My media is stored on a nas which covers me for drive failures. If I accidentally delete everything or my house catches fire I can download my personal data again and just redownload the terabytes of media.