Self-hosting useful tools
Recently I've started self-hosting some useful software tools. It started by reading Neil Brown's blog, and came into focus when Mozilla announced they were closing down Pocket - not because it was losing money, simply because "the way people use the web has evolved".
(Why yes, I'm annoyed, can you tell.)
As it happens I'd recently bought a MiniPC from Geekom, more for experimenting than anything else. It occurred to me that it had plenty of power for running small self-hosted applications.
Then someone (I think on Mastodon) recommended the Crucial X9 2TB external SSD. The lightbulb pinged, and I realised that would give me plenty of storage to go with the mini PC. So here we are.
Disclaimer: that's an Amazon affiliate link. If you follow it and buy the X9 then I get a cut, at no cost to you.
I run everything using Docker compose, so each application gets it's own instance of any databases, web servers etc that it wants. That saves a lot of time in configuring shared instances.
Services
MeTube
I find myself using this one all the time, together with the iOS Shortcut to send video links to the hosted application. It uses the yt-dlp software to download videos from any supported platform and stores them locally. This works even better when combined with Jellyfin, the next item.
Jellyfin
Jellyfin is a media server - in simpler terms, it takes movies, TV, music, whatever and makes it available to gadgets. I don't want to deal with exposing the server to the internet, which is generally "known hostile" these days, so I only make it available to devices on the same network. That still includes my phone, tablet, AppleTV, anything like that.
It will automatically scan for new files, so if you download something with MeTube it can be picked up and then served by Jellyfin. Easy.
Immich
Immich is like having Flickr on your own machine. You can back up, organize, and manage your photos. There's official apps, which work well for me on iOS at least, enabling me to automatically sync either my entire photo set or individual albums. And because it's going to my own machine I don't have to worry about the service suddenly shutting down, doubling in cost, or anything else.
StirlingPDF
If you want to do something with a PDF file, this is where you look. Lots of individual tools presented together, enabling you to slice, dice, or generally spindle fold and mutilate PDF files. What more is there to say?
paperless-ngx
This is billed as a "community-supported open-source document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, less paper."
In other words, it's not owned by anyone, you can feed it documents (PDF, images, whatever), and it'll take them, index them, running text-recognition on the documents if needed. Then you can search them.
I did find it took a little setting up to get the most from it - adding my most-used tags, correspondents etc. - but when you've got that done using it becomes very quick, and very easy. Set up an email address for it to access and you can even send it documents right from your inbox, to be automagically ingested and added.
Adding them is one thing but it's the searching that's key, and that works well. I've been able to find documents based on a single word I remembered on one of the pages. Definitely recommended.
That's it for now (July 2025). I'll keep adding new things to the list as I add them to my server - if nothing else it's a good reference point for myself in the future looking back!
NB: I did use Gemini for the post image. I'm not particularly happy with using the generative AI but I also can't deny that in this case it produces a good result. It's something I'm still thinking through.