Now that the holidays are over and real life has resumed, you’re probably looking for some new projects to tackle in your homelab. Whether you need to monitor service uptime, share files with friends, or make your own short URLs, here are three homelab projects to tackle in the new year.
Keep tabs on your website and service uptime
Downtime notifications can be crucial to running a homelab
Whether you host public websites or just private internal services, knowing when something goes down can be crucial to your homelab. I have a lot of services hosted at home, and they’re all on the same virtual machine, so I just monitor one of them (for now)—I do plan to expand this to monitoring each individual service in the future.
While there are online tools to monitor your services, like UptimeRobot, self-hosting your own uptime monitor is just as easy, and you get more features for free. I personally use Uptime Kuma for this. It’s an easy-to-run Docker container, and I have it sitting on a system that never powers off, so it can monitor all of my services without me worrying that the uptime monitor itself might go down.
I’m a huge advocate for running all of your homelab services within your homelab, but this uptime monitor is one that I’d say might be more beneficial to run outside your homelab. Picking up a cheap VPS (virtual private server) from somewhere like Digital Ocean would allow you to ensure near-perfect uptime of your uptime monitor, because if your uptime monitor goes down, then nothing is monitoring your uptime. That’s a lot of uptime with very little downtime (hopefully).
Uptime Kuma has a lot of features that I love. The main thing I like about Uptime Kuma is its notification system. I can set it up to send me a Telegram message, a message on Discord, email, or any number of other methods. This means I don’t have to be constantly watching my email to know if a service is down, and I can just get a simple ping on whatever platform I use most, so then I can figure out what happened and get the service back online.
Setting up Uptime Kuma just takes a few minutes, and is something you definitely should do this weekend in your homelab.
Set up simple file sharing with friends
Sometimes you just need to send that Minecraft server ZIP without uploading it to Discord
If you’re anything like me, then you’ve likely needed to send a file to a friend that was larger than Discord allowed, and uploading to Google Drive just seemed like a hassle. That’s where Copyparty comes in.
Copyparty is an extremely simple app that turns a directory on your computer into a file server for others to download from. By default, it’s available on your internal network only, but you can choose to open it up to the web with a reverse proxy. Since there’s not a ton of authentication options for Copyparty, I’d recommend only turning it on for sharing specific files with a friend, then turning it back off.
You don’t actually have to install Copyparty either. Simply download the Python file and run it from within whatever folder you want to share with friends—that’s it. Of course, you can install it through pip, use the EXE file, or any number of other ways (including Docker).
Just be sure to shut the Copyparty server down once you’re done serving files to your friends. Leaving it open and accessible to anyone could be a pretty big security hole. However, the benefits and features of Copyparty are definitely worth check to share files with friends easily.
Create your own short URLs
Bit.ly is nice, but shouldn’t you control your own short URLs?
I used to use Bit.ly heavily to shorten URLs, but these days there’s far too many limits on the free plan. Google shut its URL shortener down (and then broke most of the links that used it), and Bit.ly definitely neutered its service unless you’re willing to pay for it.
So, instead of using a URL shortener that could shut down at any time (or stop letting you use it how you used to), it’s best to just self-host your own short URL generator. Shlink is the perfect tool for the job. With multiple ways to deploy (including my favorite—Docker), Shlink gives you the ability to have full control over your short URLs.
You’re able to use your own domain with Shlink, and everything stays under one roof—yours. Shlink is quite versatile. There’s a responsive PWA to use once deployed, and it also works from both an API and in your terminal. You’re able to shorten links no matter where you are.
There’s also built-in tracking so you can see how many times a specific link has been clicked on. This could be crucial information for you, depending on what your purpose is for shortening links.
So, whether you’re paying for a URL shortening service or just want to have a way to generate your own short URLs, you should spin up Shlink in your homelab this weekend.
Homelab projects are never-ending, it seems. Just today I started working on optimizing my media library with Tdarr, and I even deployed some new servers in my rack over the holidays.
If you’re like me, then you probably have far too many services running on way too many computers, and keeping track of everything is a nightmare. I deployed Homepage in my homelab in early 2025, and it’s been a fantastic tool to help me keep up with the different services in my homelab. So, after you finish deploying the three apps above, give Homepage a look—you won’t regret it.
