Four self-hosted services that I've found surprisingly useful

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I’ve been dabbling in the world of self-hosting services on my own home lab. These are traditionally services I’d normally either trust someone to host my data for free or pay a subscription fee to host elsewhere. These are my current four favorite options using Docker you can start using at home.

Hoarder

I’m a long-time tech blogger at this point in my life. I’ve been covering BlackBerry to Palm, and now iOS and Android, for over 15 years. To help keep up with all the latest news and releases, you have to have a good read it later app in my opinion.

For years, I used Pocket, but much like other things, it’s become far from the simple article archiver it once was. Now, even with a paid subscription, it’s littered my home page of saves with “recommended reading” from other users and promoted posts.

I’ve been searching for a modern take on this that I could self-host, and finally found it with Hoarder. This Docker installation gives you an updated take on the read it later web app with a new AI powered tagging system. Once installed, it does a fantastic job of allow you to save articles to find later via it browser extensions, and the in-app search is fast and accurate.

Unfortunately, it looks like a copyright troll has currently halted the project for the time being over an app and domain dispute. My runner-up would then be Readeck, but the lack of any mobile app to use the sharing menus in iOS and Android to push articles makes it a hard second. While Hoard is still an option, even with the legal battle, it wins this battle.

CommaFeed

Along the same vain as Hoarder, I consume most of my web viewing using RSS. Having an aggregated option to view all my favorite sites in one web page is a fantastic way to multitask. Many of us still mourn the loss of Google Reader, and there are great hosted options like Feedly and Inoreader.

But, one of the mainstays of self-hosting is avoiding that next useful app being gabbled up by a big tech company or a shutdown. I decided an RSS reader was another usage case that owning that service made sense and settled on CommaFeed.

There are many great alternatives like FreshRSS and MiniFlux, but I found CommaFeed had the combination of easy install and slightly more modern UI options that I was looking for in my setup. I now have all my normally followed sites I’d been using for years in Feedly and Inoreader imported into my home network.

Mealie

Next up is recipe management. I’m the main cook in our household and always searching for new ideas. I used Pocket to save recipes, but again, as the service grew I found search more and more unstable to surface what I wanted when I needed it. Eventually, I found RecipeBox as a free, hosted service and served me well.

But what’s the point of hosting your own cloud if you don’t find fun ways to use it? That’s where Mealie come into my world. This self-hosted recipe manager has been fast, intuitive, and has a great importing feature by just dumping the URL of the recipe website you want to save.

From there, Mealie works its magic to scrape the site for pictures, ingredients, and instructions of the recipe. What you end up with a very simple page similar to a cookbook entry on the web. I’ve been using it regularly to build up my favorite meals catalog and was even able to export my existing saved from RecipeBox.

My one knock of Mealie is there’s not dedicate apps for mobile that I can find. It has a very good progressive web app that covers viewing, but nothing directly from the project devs. On Android, there is a dedicated app Share to Mealie on Play Store that plugs your Mealie account in the sharing menu and at least lets you send it to your server.

Immich

This one is more about redundancy than full replacement. I still use Google Photos to back up my photos automatically from my phones. What I was looking for was a secondary option to also make sure I had a local copy being stored through the cloud as well.

Immich is exactly that. It’s pretty much Google Photos for your home server. The web interface and mobile apps borrow heavily from Google in almost every way. It even has integrated location and people search that is the only one I’ve found that rivals that of Google.

Once you have it set up in Docker, you download the mobile apps for iOS or Android. You then tell it which folders of the phone storage you want to send home, and it takes care of the rest after that. It’s a pretty plug-n-play replacement or combo for Google Photos.

What’s your favorites to self-host? The more I dive into this world, you see fanboys of so many services you didn’t even know existed!