Self-Hosting

Self-Hosting LibreChat: Multi-AI Chat Interface for OpenAI, Claude & Local Models Paying for ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Gemini Advanced separately gets expensive fast — and you’re still locked into each provider’s individual interface. LibreChat gives you a single, self-hosted ChatGPT-style UI that connects to all of them at once: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, local models through Ollama, and dozens more through OpenRouter and custom endpoints. It’s not just a chat wrapper. LibreChat includes conversation branching, file uploads, image generation, a code interpreter, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) with your own documents, MCP tool support, multi-user auth, and an agent system that lets you build custom AI assistants — all from one interface you fully control. ...

Self-Hosting Monica CRM: Personal Relationship Manager with Docker You’ve forgotten your partner’s coworker’s name for the third time. Your friend mentioned their kid’s allergy last month and you can’t remember which one. Your uncle told you about his surgery and you didn’t follow up. Sound familiar? Monica is an open-source personal CRM (Customer Relationship Management — except the “customers” are the people you actually care about). It gives you a structured place to record details about people in your life: what you talked about, their birthdays, their kids’ names, food preferences, important life events, and the things that make relationships feel intentional rather than accidental. ...

Self-Hosting Woodpecker CI: Lightweight Continuous Integration Most self-hosted CI/CD tools are either overkill for a homelab or painful to configure. Jenkins needs a PhD in XML. GitLab CI requires GitLab. GitHub Actions is locked to GitHub’s cloud (or a heavyweight self-hosted runner setup). Woodpecker CI takes a different approach: a lightweight, container-native CI/CD engine that uses ~100 MB of RAM for the server and ~30 MB per agent. It’s a community fork of Drone CI (before the license change), fully open source under Apache 2.0, and used in production by Codeberg — one of the largest community Git hosting platforms. ...

Self-Hosting Coolify: Your Own Heroku-Like PaaS Remember when Heroku had a free tier and deploying apps was just git push heroku main? Coolify brings that experience back — on your own hardware. It’s an open-source, self-hosted Platform-as-a-Service that handles deployments, SSL certificates, databases, and more through a clean web interface. No more manually writing Docker Compose files for every project. No more SSH-ing into servers to debug deployments. Coolify gives you a Vercel/Heroku-like experience while keeping everything under your control. ...

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. ...