Guides

Self-Hosting Dockge: Lightweight Docker Compose Manager If you’ve been managing Docker Compose stacks by SSH-ing into servers and editing YAML files in nano, Dockge is about to change your life. Created by the same developer behind Uptime Kuma, Dockge is a reactive, web-based Docker Compose manager that keeps things simple — no abstraction layers, no proprietary formats, just your compose.yaml files with a clean UI on top. Unlike Portainer (which wraps everything in its own API) or Coolify (which is a full PaaS), Dockge stays close to the metal. Your compose files live on disk exactly where you’d expect them, and you can still use docker compose commands directly. Dockge just gives you a nicer way to do it. ...

Self-Hosting Firefly III: Personal Finance with Double-Entry Bookkeeping Most personal finance apps fall into one of two camps: oversimplified trackers that can’t tell you where your money actually went, or enterprise accounting software that requires a CPA to configure. Firefly III sits in the sweet spot — it’s a proper double-entry bookkeeping system built for normal people who want real control over their finances. Firefly III is open source (AGPLv3), actively maintained, and has been around since 2015. It runs entirely on your own server, never phones home, and gives you budgets, categories, tags, piggy banks, recurring transactions, and a powerful rules engine to automate the tedious parts of financial tracking. If you’ve outgrown spreadsheets but don’t want to hand your bank data to a cloud service, this is your tool. ...

Self-Hosting Ghost: Professional Blogging Platform with Docker WordPress runs 40% of the web. Ghost wants to be the reason it doesn’t run 50%. Ghost is an open-source publishing platform built on Node.js that does three things extremely well: writing, newsletters, and memberships. The editor is fast, the output is clean, and the built-in newsletter system means you don’t need a separate Mailchimp or Buttondown subscription for basic email distribution. The catch: Ghost(Pro) hosting starts at $9/month and scales quickly. Self-hosting Ghost gives you the same platform for the cost of your server — no seat limits, no subscriber caps, and full control over your data. ...

Self-Hosting Kavita: Digital Library for Books, Comics & Manga If you’ve got a collection of ebooks, comics, or manga scattered across folders and cloud services, Kavita brings them all under one roof with a fast, beautiful reading experience. Think of it as Plex for your reading library — it scans your files, organizes them with rich metadata, and serves them through responsive web readers that work on any device. Built with .NET and Angular, Kavita handles epub, PDF, cbr, cbz, zip, rar, 7zip, and even raw image folders. It supports multiple users with role-based access, reading progress tracking, and an optional Kavita+ subscription for external metadata, reviews, and scrobbling integration. Whether you’re managing a personal library or sharing with family, Kavita scales elegantly. ...

Self-Hosting Penpot: Open Source Figma Alternative with Docker When Adobe acquired Figma for $20 billion in 2022 (later abandoned), it sent a clear message: your design tools are only as independent as the company behind them. Penpot exists so that message doesn’t have to matter. Penpot is a fully open-source design and prototyping platform licensed under MPL 2.0. It runs in the browser, supports real-time collaboration, outputs native SVG/CSS/HTML, and — crucially — can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure. No vendor lock-in, no per-seat pricing that scales into absurdity, no surprise acquisitions that change the terms overnight. ...

Docker Compose Profiles: Managing Dev, Staging, and Production You’ve got a self-hosted stack running in production. Now you want a staging copy to test updates before they hit your live services. Maybe a dev environment too, with debug tools and hot-reloading. The old way? Three separate docker-compose.yml files with 80% overlap, constantly drifting out of sync. Docker Compose profiles solve this. One compose file, multiple environments. Services tagged with profiles only start when you explicitly activate that profile. Everything else runs by default. ...

Self-Hosting Maybe Finance: Open Source Personal Finance Tracker Most personal finance apps want your bank credentials, store your data on their servers, and charge a monthly fee for the privilege. Maybe Finance flips that model — it’s a fully open-source personal finance app you run on your own hardware. Maybe started as a funded fintech startup, pivoted to open source, and eventually archived the project under AGPLv3. The app is feature-complete and actively forked by the community. You get net worth tracking, transaction management, account aggregation, spending breakdowns, and even AI-powered features — all running on your own server with your data never leaving your network. ...

Self-Hosting Teable: Airtable Alternative with PostgreSQL Backend Airtable changed how teams think about databases. A spreadsheet interface on top of a relational database — simple enough for anyone, powerful enough for real workflows. But Airtable’s pricing climbs fast, row limits sting, and your data lives on someone else’s servers. Teable is the open-source answer. It gives you the same spreadsheet-like UI with grid, kanban, form, gallery, and calendar views — all backed by PostgreSQL. Your data stays in a real database you control, with no row limits beyond your hardware. It handles millions of rows without breaking a sweat. ...

Setting Up ZFS on Linux for Home Server Storage If you’re self-hosting anything important — media libraries, documents, photos, databases — your storage layer matters more than any app you run on top of it. A single bit flip, a dying drive, or an accidental rm -rf can wipe out years of data. ZFS was designed to prevent exactly that. It’s a combined filesystem and volume manager that checksums every block, supports snapshots, and can heal corrupted data automatically. Originally built by Sun Microsystems for enterprise servers, it’s now the gold standard for home server storage. ...

The Complete Self-Hosting Security Stack: Fail2Ban + CrowdSec + Authelia Running self-hosted services on the open internet without a security stack is like leaving your front door unlocked in a busy neighborhood. Individual tools help, but real protection comes from layering defenses so each one covers the gaps of the others. This guide builds a complete security stack using three open-source tools: Fail2Ban — reactive log-based banning for brute-force attacks CrowdSec — community-powered threat intelligence and behavioral detection Authelia — authentication portal with single sign-on and multi-factor authentication Together, they give you intrusion prevention, shared threat intelligence, and access control. All running in Docker, all free. ...