Posts

If your team’s documentation lives in scattered Google Docs, random Notion pages, and Slack messages nobody can find — Outline is the fix. It’s a fast, beautiful, open-source wiki that feels like a modern app instead of a dusty Wikipedia clone. What is Outline? Outline is a self-hosted knowledge base and wiki built with React and Node.js. It supports real-time collaborative editing, Markdown, nested document collections, and blazing-fast search. Think of it as Notion’s wiki feature, but running on your own hardware. ...

Complete Guide to Docker Volumes and Bind Mounts Every self-hosted container you run — Jellyfin, Paperless-ngx, Nextcloud, your databases — needs to store data somewhere. Kill the container without persistent storage and everything’s gone. Docker gives you two main options: volumes and bind mounts. Understanding when to use each is one of the most important skills for any self-hoster. The Problem: Containers Are Ephemeral By default, any data written inside a container lives in its writable layer. When the container is removed, that data vanishes. This is by design — containers are meant to be disposable. ...

Google Analytics is powerful, but it comes with a cost: your visitors’ privacy. Umami is a self-hosted analytics platform that gives you the insights you need without cookies, fingerprinting, or sending data to third parties. It’s lightweight, GDPR-compliant out of the box, and looks great doing it. What is Umami? Umami is an open-source, privacy-focused web analytics tool built with Next.js and PostgreSQL (or MySQL). It tracks page views, referrers, devices, and more — all without cookies or personal data collection. The dashboard is clean, fast, and does exactly what you need without the bloat of Google Analytics. ...

Excalidraw is one of those tools that looks deceptively simple — a hand-drawn style whiteboard in your browser — but once you start using it, you realize it’s replaced half your diagramming stack. Architecture diagrams, flowcharts, wireframes, quick sketches during meetings — it handles all of it with a clean, intuitive interface. The hosted version at excalidraw.com works great, but self-hosting gives you full control over your data, private collaboration without third-party servers, and the ability to embed it into your own workflows. ...

Task management apps want your data and your wallet. Todoist locks features behind premium tiers. TickTick has a free limit. Notion is great until you realize your entire workflow lives on someone else’s server. Vikunja is a self-hosted, open source task manager that handles projects, kanban boards, Gantt charts, and CalDAV sync — all running on your own hardware. What Vikunja Does Projects and tasks — organize with subtasks, priorities, labels, and due dates Kanban boards — drag-and-drop card view like Trello Gantt charts — timeline view for project planning CalDAV integration — sync tasks to any calendar app (Thunderbird, DAVx⁵, Apple Reminders) Reminders — email and in-app notifications Team collaboration — share projects with other users, assign tasks Attachments and comments — attach files, leave notes on tasks API and webhooks — automate everything Todoist import — migrate your existing tasks directly Prerequisites A Linux server with Docker and Docker Compose installed A domain name (optional but recommended for HTTPS) 512MB RAM minimum — Vikunja is lightweight Docker Setup Create a directory for Vikunja: ...

Every developer has a collection of bookmarked websites for encoding Base64, generating UUIDs, converting timestamps, or formatting JSON. What if all of those lived on your own server in a single, clean interface? That’s IT-Tools — a Swiss Army knife of developer utilities packed into one Docker container. What is IT-Tools? IT-Tools is a self-hosted web application built with Vue.js that bundles over 80 useful utilities for developers, sysadmins, and power users. Everything runs client-side in your browser — the server just serves the static files. No data leaves your machine. ...

If Trello’s pricing changes and data policies have you looking for alternatives, Planka is one of the best self-hosted Kanban boards available. It’s clean, fast, supports real-time collaboration, and runs beautifully in Docker. What is Planka? Planka is an open-source, self-hosted project management tool built around Kanban boards. Think Trello, but running on your own hardware with no account limits, no feature gates, and no subscription fees. Why Self-Host Your Project Management? Privacy: Your project data stays on your server No user limits: Add your entire team without per-seat pricing No feature restrictions: All features available out of the box Real-time sync: Changes appear instantly across all connected users Markdown support: Rich card descriptions with full markdown editing 100+ notification providers: Slack, Discord, email, and more SSO support: OpenID Connect integration for enterprise environments Prerequisites Before starting, you’ll need: ...

Running multiple self-hosted services on one server creates a problem: they all need different ports. Nextcloud on 8080, Jellyfin on 8096, Grafana on 3000 — and you’re expected to remember all of them. Worse, none of them have SSL unless you set it up manually. Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) fixes this by giving you a clean web UI to manage reverse proxy hosts, automatically provision SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt, and control access — all without touching a single Nginx config file. ...

Push notifications are the backbone of modern alerting. Server went down? Backup failed? Someone logged into your machine? You want to know now, not when you check your email three hours later. Ntfy (pronounced “notify”) lets you send push notifications to your phone or desktop using simple HTTP requests. No app registration, no Firebase setup, no Google Cloud accounts. Just curl and done. What is Ntfy? Ntfy is a self-hosted, HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. You publish messages to “topics” (think of them as channels), and any device subscribed to that topic gets the notification instantly. It works over HTTP, WebSockets, and has native apps for Android and iOS. ...

If you’ve ever wanted your own private GitHub without the complexity of GitLab or the resource hunger of enterprise solutions, Gitea is your answer. It’s a lightweight, self-hosted Git service written in Go that runs happily on a Raspberry Pi while still offering pull requests, issues, CI/CD, and package registries. Gitea uses minimal resources (typically under 200MB of RAM) and starts in seconds. It’s the perfect fit for home labs, small teams, and anyone who wants full control over their code. ...