Guides

Complete Guide to Docker Healthchecks and Restart Policies Your Jellyfin container is running. Docker says it’s healthy. But the web UI returns a blank page and nobody can stream anything. Docker’s default “running” status only tells you the process hasn’t crashed — it says nothing about whether the service actually works. Docker healthchecks fix this. They let you define what “healthy” actually means for each container, and combined with restart policies, they create a self-healing setup where broken services recover automatically without you waking up at 3 AM. ...

Running Caddy Server: The Zero-Config HTTPS Reverse Proxy You’re running a dozen Docker containers. Each one listens on a different port. You’re tired of remembering 192.168.1.50:8096 for Jellyfin and :3000 for Gitea. You want jellyfin.yourdomain.com with HTTPS — and you don’t want to wrestle with Nginx config files or manually renew Let’s Encrypt certificates. Caddy does all of this automatically. Point a domain at it, tell it where your service lives, and it handles HTTPS certificates, renewal, and reverse proxying with almost zero configuration. ...

Self-Hosting Leantime: Open Source Project Management for Small Teams Most project management tools fall into two camps: either dead simple (Trello — a board and not much else) or enterprise-grade sprawl (Jira — where tickets go to die in a hierarchy of epics, stories, and sub-tasks nobody reads). If you’re running a small team, freelancing, or managing personal projects, neither extreme fits well. Leantime occupies the space between. It gives you kanban boards, Gantt charts, goal tracking, timesheets, wikis, and sprint management in a single self-hosted package. What makes it unusual is the design philosophy: built with ADHD, autism, and dyslexia in mind, it prioritizes reducing cognitive overload rather than adding more features behind more menus. ...

Self-Hosting Paperless-GPT: AI-Powered Document Classification You’ve scanned your documents into Paperless-ngx. Maybe hundreds, maybe thousands. Now comes the tedious part — naming them, tagging them, sorting them into the right categories. Every receipt, invoice, letter, and tax form needs a sensible title and the right tags, or your digital filing cabinet becomes a digital junk drawer. Paperless-GPT solves this by connecting your Paperless-ngx instance to a large language model. Drop a document in, and the AI generates a title, assigns tags, identifies the correspondent, and even extracts custom field data. It can also re-OCR your documents using LLM vision, catching text that traditional OCR engines miss on messy or low-quality scans. ...

Building a Home Lab on a Budget: $100 to $500 Tiers You don’t need a rack full of enterprise servers to start self-hosting. Some of the most useful home labs run on hardware that costs less than a month of cloud subscriptions. This guide breaks down exactly what you can build at three budget tiers — $100, $300, and $500 — with specific hardware recommendations, software stacks, and realistic expectations for each level. ...

Dropbox gives you 2GB free, charges $12/month for 2TB, and scans every file you upload. Google Drive is no different — your documents train their AI models and feed their ad network. If you want file sync without the surveillance tax, Syncthing is the answer. Syncthing is a free, open-source, peer-to-peer file synchronization tool. It syncs files directly between your devices with no cloud server in the middle. No accounts, no storage limits, no monthly fees. Your files never touch a third-party server. ...

Most monitoring tools make you suffer through hours of configuration before you see a single metric. Netdata flips that on its head — install it, and within seconds you’re looking at hundreds of real-time charts covering every aspect of your system. No agents to configure, no dashboards to build, no query languages to learn. What is Netdata? Netdata is an open-source, real-time monitoring agent that collects thousands of metrics per second from your servers, containers, and applications. It comes with a built-in web dashboard that auto-discovers everything running on your system and visualizes it immediately. ...

If you have a collection of comics, manga, or graphic novels sitting in folders on a hard drive, Komga turns that pile into a fully browsable, searchable library with a built-in web reader. Think of it as Jellyfin, but purpose-built for comics and manga. What is Komga? Komga is a free, open-source media server for comics, manga, magazines, and eBooks. It scans your existing files (CBZ, CBR, PDF, EPUB), organizes them into libraries and series, and serves them through a clean web interface or any OPDS-compatible reader app. ...

Every search you make on Google, Bing, or even DuckDuckGo tells someone something about you. Search history builds a disturbingly accurate profile — your health concerns, financial situation, political interests, and everything in between. SearXNG flips that model entirely: you get the results, nobody gets your data. SearXNG is a free, open-source metasearch engine that aggregates results from over 70 search engines simultaneously. It strips out tracking parameters, doesn’t log your queries, and runs entirely on your own server. Think of it as a search engine that works for you instead of advertisers. ...

Most note-taking apps want you to pay monthly, sync through their cloud, or install an Electron app that eats 500MB of RAM. Memos takes a different approach: it’s a single binary that stores everything in SQLite, looks like a Twitter feed for your thoughts, and exposes a full API for automation. What is Memos? Memos is a self-hosted, open-source note-taking service built with Go and React. Think of it as a private micro-blog for quick thoughts, bookmarks, code snippets, and daily notes. Everything is stored locally, rendered in Markdown, and accessible through a clean web UI or REST API. ...