3 Self-Hosted Services I’m Running in My Homelab and Use Every Day

When you start a house full of self-hosted services, it is difficult to choose one. I have tried several, but these three have been my pillars for a few months or more, and I will show you how I use them too.

Jellyfin: All things in streaming

To broadcast my film and my Collection TV series, I use Jellyfin. It is commonly known as the free plex alternative. To be honest, I never tried plex. When I started my media collection, I went directly to Jellyfin knowing that it was not as rich in functionality but wanting to start with the free and open source solution instead of investing in the non -free alternative. It may have been the fan of Linux in me.

A typical criticism of Jellyfin is that it takes more manual intervention and know-how to continue to operate compared to Plex, which has business support and is designed to be as Plug-And-Play as possible. This could be true, but the history of problems, including the automated sharing of the history of the watch, as well as forced and unpopular redesign, make me think that I made the right decision. I have know-how, so why mainly pay for the same product with a worst leadership?

I also use it for music

In addition to watching movies and television with my Jellyfin, I also enjoy her musical streaming capacities. If you download your digital music collection, Jellyfin is able to automatically find information on the Art Plus album and photos via the Musicbrainz and Audidb plugins. It automatically downloads the synchronized lyrics in time, if you install and configure the LRCLIB plugin.

You can broadcast your music via the Official Jellyfin application or a number of Jellyfin customers only musical. For a certain time, I mainly listened to the Finnies on my Android phone, but it caused me problems and I did not like the operation of navigation, so I started to look for a better alternative.

Recently, I went to Finamp. At first, I was disappointed to see that there was no support for the words. Investigating further, however, I learned the current beta version of the application, which implies a complete overhaul of the application design, adds a lyrical support.

The beta version of Finamp looks and feels much better, especially with the lyrics. I have already encountered strange behavior, however, because it is still in beta. I hope these problems will be postponed and we soon see a complete release of the overhaul.

NextCloud: Cloud storage that remains local

I lost most of my uses for my Google Drive several years ago when I installed NextCloud on my Raspberry Pi. I can store important files in my NextCloud server, and I keep most of them synchronized with my devices. I use this to my advantage by combining NextCloud with Keepassxc. It is an offline password manager only, and I am able to keep my password vault synchronized on the devices by storing it my nextcloud server.

This ability to keep my synchronized cloud files has the additional advantage of acting as a series of backups. If my server is wiped in one way or another, I can restore most of my important files as long as I synchronized them with my devices somewhere.

A cool thing I discovered (before getting Jellyfin for music) is that if you find and install the free “music” application in your NextCloud instance, it is delivered with an integrated support for the subsonic protocol. It is a technical jargon, which means that you can diffuse remotely from your NextCloud server with musical applications that have subsonic care, such as Strawberry Player. In this way, you can listen to all your music without having to download it from the server first.

Some time ago, I got tired of using an RSS web application that came with advertisements and pushed me to buy a subscription, but I also wanted to keep the possibility of synchronizing my collection of flows and reading history on devices. Enter Freshrss, a flow manager that you can host yourself. You can create several accounts for different people on your network or for yourself. Perhaps you have workflows and personal flows, and you connect to separate accounts to keep them organized. You may have a separate account only to follow the socials such as Mastodon or Bluesky stoves and accounts.

It is light, so you can reuse an old undernourished laptop to host it. I recommend installing Dietpi as an operating system because it includes Freshrss as one of the services it can install and configure automatically, with minimal work on your part.

Related

How to install Freshrss on a Raspberry Pi

Everything you need is a PI and a lot of flows to follow.

Once installed, you can use the web application as a flow player, or you can hang your account in an independent flow player that accepts Google Reader or Fever Protocols.

I use Readrops on Android and RSS Guard on my desktop and laptop. I like the readings, but I am not as much a fan of RSS Guard. It is difficult to put my finger on it, but something about the user interface is clumsy and congested. This also looks horrible with the current theme I have on my desk Garda Linux. I would like to try another office player, so let me know if you have suggestions – he just needs to have a Linux support.

What I am going to be seated then

Although the above elements are my long-term operations, I am always looking for the next thing to organize myself. I am the most interested in trying the Sunshine Game Streaming Service. I hope this will allow me to broadcast graphic games, from my game PC to the Mini PC that I use in my home theater. After that, I consider ArchiveBox, which is supposed to allow you to keep internet pieces that you do not want to lose.