Hey folks! 👋

I’ve created a small Ansible playbook for automating the initial setup of Linux servers — perfect for anyone spinning up a VPS or setting up a home server.

🔗 GitHub: github.com/mist941/basic-server-configuration

🛠️ What it does:

• Creates a secure user with SSH key access
• Disables root login & password authentication
• Configures UFW firewall with safe defaults
• Installs and sets up fail2ban
• Enables unattended security upgrades
• Syncs time using NTP
• Installs useful tools like vim, curl, htop, mtr, and more

💬 Why I built this:

I used to manually harden every new VPS or server I set up — and eventually decided to automate it once and for all. If you:

• run self-hosted services,
• want a safe and quick VPS setup,
• or want to get started with Ansible

this playbook might save you time and effort.

🚀 Contributing:

I’ve created a few good first issues if anyone wants to contribute! 🤝
Feedback, PRs, or even just a ⭐ would be hugely appreciated.

Happy Friday, r/selfhosted! Linked below is the latest edition of This Week in Self-Hosted, a weekly newsletter recap of the latest activity in self-hosted software and content.

This week's features include:

• Plex's new mobile app redesign
• Ghost CMS's officially entrance into the fediverse
• Software updates and launches
• A spotlight on BookLore (u/WorldTraveller101) -- a self-hosted book collection management and reading platform
• A ton of great guides, videos, and content from the community

Thanks, and as usual, feel free to reach out with feedback!

This Week in Self-Hosted (4 April 2025)

• Have a Raspberry Pi 5 running some applications like Immich, paperless ngx homepage etc using docker compose.
• Purchased a cloudflare cheap domain.
• Setup a cloudflared tunnel from my pi for access to the apps. Created CNAME record on Cloudflare dashboards.

Enabled Full Strict and use HTTPS certs and stuff like that on Cloudflare dashboard.

Hello there r/selfhosted! Been a while since I shared an episode here as posting every time you release a thing gets old fast. But, this week we have an episode that is really pretty useful for self-hosters. How to avoid getting DDOSd by AI scrapers by “weighing the soul” of every visitor to your site with Anubis.

Thanks for listening! Alex

——————

AI companies are rewriting the social contract, scraping first and asking for forgiveness later.

Xe Iaso is fighting back and we spoke to them on this weeks Self-Hosted podcast.

https://selfhosted.show/146

Hi, I was wondering how everyone keeps track of their server hardware, the software and other services you are running on there. I was taking a look at upgrading some memory in my server and realized that I had no idea what the memory in the machine was, so thought it might be smart to document some of that stuff.

How do you guys keep track of these things? Do you have an internal wiki, a git repo or just a piece of paper or whatever? Curious to hear everyone's systems.

Hey thinking of starting again buying music to support musicians I love. With that I will need something to replace my Spotify player, And given that I do have a NAS that can run things... I'd love to simply self host.

What is the closest we can get to Spotify/Apple Music level of UX with our own music? Especially a good mobile player will be key.

Hey, r/selfhosted

I’m developing a self-hosted app aimed at simplifying accounting and administrative tasks for private teachers (think music tutors, language instructors, etc.), and I’d love your ideas and feedback!

My fiancée is a private English teacher here in Brazil, and I’ve watched her juggle spreadsheets, sticky notes, and chaotic WhatsApp reminders to track student payments, invoices, and schedules. Existing tools are either too generic, too expensive, or lack features tailored to small-scale educators. So… I’m building something better—and eventually open source!

What I envision:

• Track students, classes, schedules, and payment status.
• Visual reminders for overdue payments, income reports, and payment history.
• Generate invoices/receipts (with support for tax related documents, e.g., Brazilian "nota fiscal") automatically.

Where I Need Help:

1. Feature Ideas. I mean, are there other apps with this in mind? What's missing in them?
2. Would calendar sync (Google/Outlook), messaging (WhatsApp/Email templates), or tax APIs be useful?
3. What deployment options (Docker, Kubernetes), databases, or auth methods (OAuth, LDAP) should I prioritize?
4. MOST IMPORTANTLY: If you’re a teacher/tutor, what frustrates you about managing admin work?
5. Would you contribute? Any preferences for stack (leaning toward Java/SpringBoot + React)?
6. Is there any way to make this profitable even with it being open source? I'm a poor person from a poor country and I'd love a way to make money, but I would never give up on it being OSS.

Sorry for all these questions... This is super early stage, so all ideas are welcome—even “that’s dumb, that's a terrible idea do this instead” feedback! The goal is to build a community-driven tool to help educators.

TL;DR: Building a OSS self-hosted app to help teachers manage students, payments, and invoices. What features/tech would you want?

(Thanks for reading—my fiancée already approves of anything that reduces her spreadsheet time 😅)

Hey everyone!

I am excited to announce the release of Papra, a minimalistic document management and archiving platform. Papra is designed to be simple to use (and deploy) and accessible to everyone. It is a platform for long-term document storage and management, kind like Paperless-ngx but with a fresh new design and a big focus on simplicity.

It's not perfect yet, but I am working hard to improve it and add new features. I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improvement!

Some of the features include:

• Document management: upload, store, search and tag your documents
• Authentication: user accounts and authentication
• Organizations: create organizations to separate your documents (private, family, colleagues, etc.)
• Email ingestion: send/forward emails to a generated address to automatically import documents (integrated with OwlRelay)
• Content extraction: automatically extract text from images or scanned documents for search
• Standard ui stuff: dark mode, responsive design, etc.
• Self-hosting: host your own instance of Papra using Docker or other methods
• Open source: the project is open-source under the AGPL-3.0 license and free to use
• And more!

I have plans for many more features not yet implemented, such as auto tagging rules, cli/sdk/api, folder ingestion daemon, document sharing/requests, and more, if you want to try it out, a live demo of the platform is available at demo.papra.app (no backend, no account required, client-side local storage only).

As this is a beta release, I am looking for feedback and suggestions for improvement, so please feel free to reach out to me on Discord or GitHub.

Some useful links:

• Github repository: https://github.com/papra-hq/papra
• Website: https://papra.app
• Live Demo: https://demo.papra.app
• Self-hosting documentation: https://docs.papra.app/
• Discord community: https://discord.gg/8UPjzsrBNF

Thanks for your time, and I hope you enjoy using Papra!

I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on: SparkyBudget, a budget app focused on visual-based tracking rather than the usual tabular style. It’s currently in beta and integrates with the SimpleFin API, so you’ll need a token from them to use it—or you can try it out with the included demo DB file.

Check it out here: https://github.com/CodeWithCJ/SparkyBudget.

Two years ago, I was Googling how to make a folder in Linux. Now, I’ve built this app from scratch, and I’m really proud of the progress! I’m not a web dev, so the UI is still being fine-tuned, and the app is under heavy development. If you’re interested in testing it, I’d love your feedback!

Just a heads-up: please back up your DB and env files daily before updating to a new version—those are the only files you need to save.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Hello

New to self hosting so not sure if this is the right place or if there is a different home server reddit, but I am looking for a software that can display my drive health of external HDDs that are connected to my server? My main requirement is that this software can be accessed over the web on a self hosted address so I can check its stats randomly on my laptop or on my phone?

Anyone have any recommendations?

I’ve been working on a project called MyBangs, a self-hosted search wrapper that brings the power of customizable "search bangs" (like DuckDuckGo’s !g or !w) to your own setup.

What does it do?

• Lets you create your own search shortcuts (e.g., !gh for GitHub, !yt for YouTube).
• Fully self-hosted – no reliance on external search engines’ bang systems like DuckDuckGo or Unduck. (Of course, you depend on the search engines you use.)
• Customizable search engines – add, modify, or remove any engines you want.
• Lightweight, privacy-focused, and easy to deploy.

How to get started?

Try it at: https://mybangs.party/

Check out the project on GitHub: https://github.com/Kilianjpo/MyBangs

Simple docker compose setup...for anyone looking for a how-to video on setting up Crowdsec with Caddy Reverse Proxy:

https://youtu.be/jlWarrYWV1c

Anyone use a smart plug (with feature either built in or can be flashed with something like ESPHome) that can ping an external IP - if it can't reach the external IP, power off for a few seconds and power back on automatically?

I have a router that sometimes loses public IP until it's rebooted, standard smart plug powering it doesn't work because as soon as it's turned off, the router loses power regardless and can't turn it back on unless I'm home. With the router offline, I can't even VPN in to trigger it through local network.

I figure - worst case - I can somehow also maybe do this with a standard smart plug that integrates into HomeAssistant, and have HA control the logic within my local network (ping an external IP, if it fails turn the plug off and back on again).

Just wondering if anyone has done similar and what they ended up with that works best.

The gist of what I'm looking for is a centralized logging set up where I can query log data from various sources:

• Caddy
• PHP (Laravel and WordPress mainly)
• System logs like dmesg for UFW
• Expandable/customizable (e.g. via plugins) for future use cases

I know ELK is typical for this sort of thing, but my servers a bit more low-resource. I don't know exactly how well Grafana works on lower-end KVMs and VPSes but if there is good experience from others I'm happy to consider.

There won't really be a whole lot of data to parse through (e.g. I'm not looking to monitor a multi-million dollar operation). But I would like to be able to expand the capabilities or what gets logged as needed.

Preferably there would also be an authentication set up where I can have clients view logs for their specific apps, yet I can view all. My client base is small right now so again I don't project there being much to ingest all things considered.

I did look at the awesome-selfhosted GitHub but the closest tool I found so far was Telegraf but it feels like they don't really know the use-case for their app, just that it fits a niche.

Preferably I'd like a solution written in Go, but other options are fine too.