Services
Self-hosting is most useful here when it improves control over personal data, connects local systems, or makes experimentation inexpensive. Product choices change, but naming the real software makes the architecture easier to understand.
This is a catalog of software managed by the environment, not a live uptime list. Some definitions are intentionally retained but disabled while they are being evaluated or are not presently needed; current examples include Jellyfin, n8n, Docling, Qwen3-TTS, CouchDB, rclone, and Renovate.
Personal information
| Capability | Software | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Photos and video | Immich | Organizes and searches the personal photo/video library |
| Documents | Paperless-ngx and Docling | Ingests, extracts, and organizes scanned records |
| Passwords | Vaultwarden | Hosts a Bitwarden-compatible password vault |
| Calendars and contacts | Radicale | Lightweight CalDAV and CardDAV service |
| File sharing | Copyparty and Syncthing | Browser-based sharing and device-to-device synchronization |
| Personal knowledge | Anki Sync and OpenProject | Study synchronization and project organization |
The goal is not to eliminate every external provider; it is to keep the canonical copy of important personal data under deliberate control.
Media and home systems
| Capability | Software | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Video libraries | Plex and Jellyfin | Streams locally stored films and television |
| Music | Navidrome and Feishin | Music server and web player |
| Audiobooks | Audiobookshelf | Organizes and plays spoken-word collections |
| E-books | Calibre | Manages the reading library |
| Cameras | Frigate | Local detection, recording, and camera integration |
| Home automation | Home Assistant and n8n | Household state, routines, and general workflows |
| Downloads | qBittorrent behind Gluetun and YTPTube | Managed acquisition and download workflows |
Platform services
| Area | Software | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Source control and CI | Gitea, Gitea Actions, and Renovate | Stores code, deploys changes, and proposes dependency updates |
| Ingress and certificates | Traefik and step-ca | Routes web traffic and supplies public and private certificates |
| Traffic security | CrowdSec | Uses observed behavior to screen hostile traffic |
| DNS and remote access | CoreDNS, Pi-hole, and WireGuard | Local naming, filtering, and private remote connectivity |
| Monitoring | Prometheus, Grafana, exporters, and Telegraf | Collects and presents infrastructure health |
| Container management | Portainer | Provides an operational view of Docker workloads |
| Analytics | Umami | Privacy-oriented analytics for personal sites |
| Personal publishing | Personal website, recipe book, and web log | Publishes projects and writing from the same environment |
Local AI
Ollama and Open WebUI provide local language-model serving and a browser interface. Qwen3-TTS and Sherpa-ONNX cover speech synthesis and recognition experiments. A telephone voice-agent stack joins FreePBX, LiveKit, local speech processing, retrieval over selected personal knowledge, and specialist agent roles.
The dedicated graphics card is passed through to the GPU application VM for these workloads. Local models provide a place to explore voice interfaces and retrieval without assuming that private source material must be sent to a hosted model.
Communication
Matrix Synapse provides self-hosted messaging. FreePBX supplies household telephony and SIP routing, while LiveKit supports the experimental local voice-agent path.