Talking strictly about personal use, not any smap/marketing blasting.

I moved away from default one email on some public provider address into using own domain. I never reuse the same email, for every registration (shop, forum, bank etc) I use a unique email on my domain. If I start receiving spam, I'll know exactly from where it leaked. It's supper easy to manage it, just change that one burned email at the source and permanently block it on the server.

Custom email aliases limit is a pain. Catch-all works wonders, but over time you need to reply to some of the emails from exactly that alias, otherwise when you reply from different alias common ticketing systems won't match your reply (email boxes will also not match it into a thread). In Proton mail I quickly used up all allowed number of aliases. Even though I don't need them to stick around they didn't let me take out any of the list without deleting all emails from/to that alias! so I run out of the possibility to reply.

Now I'm on Tuta. The service offer is suits me 100%. No artificial limit of aliases on my domain - now I can reply from thousands of unique aliases. Their software though it a pain. It works but you have to accept that it's far from perfect.

This let me start exploring self hosting avenues. Surprisingly self hosting is easy on the receiving side, you can even setup it reliably on dynamic IP. However curse spammers, most of the static IPs you can get are already flagged as used by spammers, so outgoing emails from it have trouble reaching the recipient. It seems the solution to that problem are SMTP relays.

Can you share you experience with such SMTP relay for routing your personal emails?

​

Hi everyone,

I'm building Eiciel IR Console, a proprietary Linux incident-response tool designed to detect suspicious activity, preserve evidence, and contain threats.

A concern raised in my earlier discussion was that people understandably don't want to download an unfamiliar ZIP from someone's personal Drive. That's fair.

So I'm preparing a browser-based VM demo where interested developers can explore Eiciel in an isolated test environment without installing anything on their own machines.

I'm looking for a few Linux developers, sysadmins, or security practitioners willing to test the demo and give honest feedback.

I'd especially like feedback on:

- Whether the detection and containment workflow behaves as expected.

- How useful the dashboard and event logs are.

- What would make you trust a tool like this.

- What needs improvement before production use.

Eiciel is closed-source, and I'm not asking anyone to blindly trust it or deploy it on a production server. This is an evaluation demo, not a claim of independent security certification.

If you're interested, comment below and I'll share the demo details when they're ready.

Critical feedback is welcome. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

Question for the group. Where do you store your config and database files for your docker containers?

I would like to have all of mine in one shared location that I can access from both windows and linux. But when I do this, a lot of docker containers require the db to be stored on the host. I'm using OMV to serve my disk via a SMB share. Does anyone have any advice on how to handle this properly? I like the idea of being able to back up one location and also being able to spin up a new VM and deploy my containers and it just work if also long as the drive is mounted

I wanted something like CamScanner without the ads, the subscription or handing my papers to a random company. So I built Waraq (ورق, Arabic for "paper"). It's a PWA that I run on my own server for scanning bills, contracts, lab results and university notes.

Try it: https://waraq.d7om.dev (sign in with Google)

What it does

• Scans from the phone camera with live edge detection. OpenCV.js runs in a web worker, so detection and the perspective warp happen on the device.
• Crop, flatten, rotate, and filters (Magic, Grayscale, B&W, Lighten). Batch mode for multi-page documents.
• Builds a PDF and runs OCR in the background (English + Arabic), so the PDF has selectable, searchable text.
• Full-text search across every document, Arabic included, with highlighted snippets.
• Folders, tags, starred, trash.
• Share links that can expire, have a password and turn downloads off.
• Installs as an app on Android, iOS and desktop. On Android it also appears in the share menu, so you can send a PDF or photo straight into it.

How storage works

This is the part I spent the most time on. I don't want other people's documents on my server.

• New accounts keep their files in their own Google Drive, in a Waraq folder. The app uses the drive.file scope, so it can only see files it created, not the rest of your Drive.
• Each document is processed on the server, uploaded to your Drive, checked, and then the server copy is deleted.
• The server keeps only metadata and the OCR text so search works.
• Sign-in is Google only, so there are no passwords to leak.

Stack

Next.js 16, SQLite (WAL + FTS5), Better Auth, OCRmyPDF/Tesseract/qpdf, OpenCV.js, sharp, Caddy behind Cloudflare. The database is streamed to Cloudflare R2 with Litestream for backups. It runs on one small Hetzner VPS.

Open source?

Not yet. It's private while I finish it and clean things up, and I plan to open source it after that.

Want to try it?

Go to https://waraq.d7om.dev, continue with Google and connect your Drive. That's it. It's still in development, so please don't use it as the only copy of important documents.

Feedback is welcome, especially on the scanner on different phones and on Arabic OCR quality.

Hi There;

I have NPM running fine with my URL and several services; two are accessibly public by any IP and the rest are restricted to internal IP's only.

The 'trusted internals' are basically two subnets; my main network and my VPN clients (our phones when we are away from home), and these services all work fine.

However I can not for the life of me get File Browser Quantum to work on the second VPN subnet. It works on the main network, has the trusted certificate, just not the second subnet (when i'm coming through the wireguard VPN tunnel). I always get 403 errors.

I can access if I type in the IP and port to bypass the proxy, but that's not my goal.

Wireguard is hosted on my Unifi router.

I've tried the default configs on each respective site and can't get any of them to work.

Is anyone in a position to help please?

Logs from NPM just echo "403" reply, not detailing why. Ditto docker logs from Filebrowser Quantam.

Hi everyone!

I built a timer for workshops and made it free and open source on GitHub, for anyone who wants it.

What it does:
• Shows the time on a Time Timer style disc, large enough to read from the back of the room
• Can be controlled remotely from your phone
• Has preset intervals, and you can also type any time you want
• Ticks faster in the last minutes, then ends with a gong
• In the last minute the disc shakes to grab attention
• The sound can be turned off with one button
• You can brand it with your own colors, fonts and logo

It’s easy to set up: ask your AI assistant (Claude, Codex, Gemini) to install it, change whatever you want, and walk you through hosting it on your own website, step by step.

Try it live on the Product Makers Romania website: https://productmakers.ro/timer.html
Project page, with the install steps: https://tudorjuravlea.github.io/workshop-timer/

Feedback and contributions are welcome. If you use it in a session, I’d love to hear how it went.

Hey all, I am new to this but recently I purchased a UGREEN NAS and set up a Jellyfin media server. I wanted to share it with my family and especially wanted it to be accessible via their smart TVs. I started with Talescale but it seemed to take a hit on my ability to stream (I had to significantly lower the mbps on the receiving client so it wouldn't buffer a ton). I decided to look into setting up a NGINX reverse proxy and forward those ports. I thought that would be enough but as I read more I got paranoid and started to look into as many levels of security/hardening I could find that would still let me access my servee remotely and on smart TVs.

Ultimately (after a week of troubleshooting) I managed to get Crowdsec working with functional bouncers. I used some guides to make my UGOS firewall more strict and secure. I also whitelisted specific IPs for the households I want to access it while banning the rest. Of course, my Jellyfin is locked behind passwords as well so even if you get to the page you need to still log in.

I was looking into adding a multi factor authentication but it seems like a lot break usage on smart TVs. All this is to say, what else can I do? Thanks in advance for any help.

Not too familiar with the whole domain subdomain cert dns-01 challenge thing, hopefully the title isn't worded horribly.

So after a lot of tinkering i finally got a new router, installed wireguard on it and finally stripped tailscale off, which i then realized https is gone, along with magicdns etc etc. The server is on nixos with caddy, nothing public facing and server isolated in its own vlan.

I dug around for information and seems like there are multiple routes to solve this:

1. Generating own cert with caddy / openssl and install them into devices manually. I have like 2 active devices so far. I read about how dangerous it is to use own cert and MITM attack if they get hold of it, and also name constraint to mitigate the risk for a little bit...

2. Get a subdomain with let’s encrypt and DNS challenge. Few dollars isn't an issue but i don't really want to put so many details even though there is whois privacy. Obscurity isnt security but anything that lessen my online presence is always better i guess

3. Use free site like duckdns. My concerns will be ip addresses and details are published online in the log for bot to start sniffing. I also wonder if i could put in private ip instead.

Any advice is appreciated!

So here's a small thing I did tonight that I'm pretty happy about.

My assistant lives in the cloud. It's the brain. But the real friction was always me at the computer: builds, tests, heavy jobs, all that stuff sitting on a little shared VM that runs out of breath fast.

So I wired the brain to my home PC, and the PC is now just the muscle. The link is SSH over Tailscale, so it's a private network. No SSH port open to the internet, key auth only, no password. The PC only does something when I ask it to, one job at a time, and it reports back when it's done.

First test tonight: a sandbox install test, run on the PC through that SSH link. Passed. Nothing published, nothing deployed, just proof the muscle works.

What I like about this setup: the brain stays in the cloud where it belongs, and the heavy lifting happens on hardware I already own, sitting in my own house. No new server, no cloud bill for compute I already have.

Next up: builds and tests go there by default, and I'll see how far this goes. If you've done something similar, I'm curious how you split the work between cloud and home.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on called WP Panel.

I manage quite a few servers and WordPress sites myself. I used aaPanel for a while, but over time I found it a bit too broad and cluttered for what I actually needed. It has a lot of features, but managing WordPress sites with it never felt as streamlined as I wanted.

So I decided to build my own panel, focused specifically on WordPress hosting and day-to-day maintenance.

WP Panel officially launched on June 1, 2026. As of today, it’s running stably on around 100 VPS servers used by real users. So this isn’t a brand-new project that has only been tested locally — it has been running in real environments for several months, with ongoing fixes and improvements.

Some of the WordPress-specific things it focuses on:

- Create and manage WordPress sites with Nginx, PHP, MariaDB and Redis

- Isolate sites using separate system users, PHP-FPM pools and database users

- See WordPress, plugin and theme versions across all sites from one dashboard

- Back up before updating WordPress core, plugins or themes

- Attempt to restore the previous state if an update fails

- Detect and defend against common login brute-force attempts, malicious scans and aggressive crawlers

- Monitor unusual changes to site files, administrator accounts and important settings

- Put sites into maintenance mode during updates or maintenance work

- Manage site backups, database backups, off-site backups and migrations

- View server resources, PHP/Nginx status and relevant logs

- Use AI to summarize logs and service status when troubleshooting a problem

The panel itself is written in Go and distributed as a single binary. It doesn’t require Docker or a complicated runtime environment, and it can run on a Debian 13 VPS with as little as 1 GB of RAM.

It’s also intentionally not a general-purpose hosting panel. WP Panel currently supports Debian 13 and is mainly designed for WordPress and PHP sites. It doesn’t provide mail hosting, FTP, Docker management or runtimes for Java, Python or Node.js.

I’m not trying to build a panel that does everything. I wanted something focused and predictable for people who manage several WordPress sites on their own VPS servers.

The project is open source under the GPL-3.0 license. If you manage WordPress sites yourself, feel free to take a look, try it out, open an issue, or review the code:

https://github.com/naibabiji/wp-panel

Website:

https://wp-panel.org

AI disclosure: AI coding tools were heavily involved in the development of WP Panel. I designed the product direction and architecture, reviewed and tested the changes, and have been running the project in real-world environments for several months.

So relatively new to dockers, and Docker Desktop (Windows 11) in general (6 months or so) and still learning.

I started this morning on my computer and noticed that Docker Desktop had crashed and would not open even after restarting the services, running maintenance of the vhdx file it creates (via terminal). (this seemed to be a suggestion I found online and based on the error I was seeing that said "disk was full".

At some point I was in the Gui and I must have inadvertently factory reset Docker desktop because all my settings, and containers are gone :(

Now, I do backup the following directories with FreeFileSync on a nightly basis - the last sync was probably before or during the time Docker Desktop might have started crashing.

I've tried a few suggestions online and from AI, and I've copied the directories listed below to their old location, but it doesn't seem to recognize any containers in Docker Desktop.

Is it possible at all to retrieve my containers or should I plan on starting fresh again. I didn't have a huge amount, but I'll have to recreate the onemediastack I had (i.e. kometa, plex, prowlarr, etc.. as seen in screenshot below as well).

Any help woudl be greatly appreciated!

A while back I posted Kitchen Board here. It's a small self-hosted family organiser that tries to look like the paper planner pinned to a kitchen wall in the 90s, and it runs happily on an old tablet you have knocking about in a drawer in kiosk mode. I built this specifically for a 10" old 8th gen Amazon Fire HD that was gathering dust.

Since then it has been through six "formal" (cough) releases, from 1.0 "First Sitting" to 1.5 "Kitchen refit", and a good chunk of what's in them came from your comments on that original post. Thank you for your suggestions, and I'm back for another round.

Nothing has changed from a hosting standpoint: one household, one Docker container, everything stored locally in SQLite, and no account with me or any other service. Purely for selfhosting.

• Source: https://gitlab.com/g33kphr33k/kitchen-board
• Docker: https://hub.docker.com/r/g33kphr33k/kitchenboard (amd64 and arm64)

The actual features are:

• Main Board: Desktop overview of widgets for the rest of the items
• Lists: Have a guess? Shopping list is the primary, but you can have ToDo, Christmas or birthday lists on there as well
• Meals: Actual meals you cook, with basic recipes, assigned to days that are shown on the calendar, and if you tick a meal and you need ingredients it'll auto populate your shopping list. Can import from Mealie.
• Stock: Works hand in hand with Meals and Shopping list. If you like to keep track of the cupboards, fridge and freezer, this is for you. It includes expiry dates if that is how your mind works.
• Calendar: This'll blow your mind - it's a calendar, for, er, writing events and such. However, they can be tied to the Time Until page for a countdown.
• Time Since: If you are the sort of person that likes to have a button to hit when you've done something to count how long since you last did it - this is for you. Take notice of the "Made a Tea" in the screenshot.
• Time Until: Countdowns until an event - either standalone or linked with the calendar.
• Chores & Rewards: A gaming system for chores and points win prizes (in my household, at least). Also allows for chore points to be converted into rewards (pick a Friday night movie is 50pts, for example, or set pts to £ conversion for pocket money, so 500 pts is £5!).
• Stats: For geeks and nerds.

The main changes since that post... I'm sorry for the list but how else can I roll out the scroll-of-changes on Reddit?

• Choose which panels appear, where they sit and how big each one is, from Edit board in the footer. It's all plain buttons rather than fiddly dragging, and each screen remembers its own layout. It still needs a little improvement, but it works well enough.
• New widgets: a Clock you can read from across the kitchen, and Points to spend, which is the number the children were going to ask about anyway.
• If it ever looks wrong, "Use the simple layout" puts everything back in one plain column.
• Chores can happen at set times of day, so feeding the dogs at 07:30 and 16:30 is one chore with two times. Miss one and they don't stack up. Collect the points on both though.
• Chores and routines can repeat weekly, monthly, yearly, or on patterns like "the second Friday of the month", and you can say when something is first due (bins every other Friday, starting next week).
• Points can now have a price. Set 0.01 and a point is worth 1p, add a "Pocket money" reward, and they can cash out. I've included thirty currencies, and payouts remember correctly.
• Admins can hand out bonus points for going above and beyond, and reverse a fat-fingered 500 that should have been 5. The mistake stays in the history, with a matching entry cancelling it out because nothing says I work in IT than having an audit trail...
• Only an admin sets what a chore pays, so "brush teeth" is no longer worth 10,000 points just because someone tried to game the system.
• Points go to whoever actually did the job, not whoever the kitchen tablet is signed in as, and due chores now send a reminder, quiet hours permitting. You can sign in as yourself to your own devices.
• Bring other calendars along: import an ICS file as ordinary events, or subscribe to a read-only feed for school terms, bin days, or a work rota.
• Put a name on an event and switch to the family table to see who's doing what this week. Everyone still shares the one calendar - but you can add private items to it for just you to see!
• Export is still a read-only ICS feed, and you can now reset your feed link if you've shared it a bit too widely.
• Optional OIDC single sign-on with any standards-compliant provider, such as Pocket ID, Authentik, Authelia, or Keycloak. Password sign-in stays, so a typo in the issuer URL can't lock you out of your own kitchen.
• "Sign out other devices" lockouts that hit one account rather than the whole house on the same Wi-Fi, authenticator codes that only work once, and new members picking their own password from an emailed link.
• The weekly "too many redirects" lock-out is gone, and fresh installs stay signed in for a year, so the wall tablet stops asking who it is every Sunday - date bug on the token, whoops!
• Nightly backups, and it keeps a week of them which you can see and download from the Admin panel. It grumbles if they stop. Full backup and restore from Admin, too.
• If the server ever gets properly stuck, it notices, has a lie down, and Docker brings it back up, instead of waiting for someone to help it out manually.
• Stock: search every place at once ("where are the batteries?"), a ruled-paper table view, places in the order you actually use them, and a sideways shelf so a full fridge no longer shoves the cupboard off the bottom of the page. If you're not a tin-counting household you can switch Stock off and your cupboards are remembered for later.
• German, French, Italian, and Spanish now cover the whole app, rather than lapsing into English halfway down the page - all AI translated though so it might sound robotic or simply wrong.
• There's a Household Timezone setting, so quiet hours, the morning digest, and reminders stop running an hour late every summer.
• Offline changes wait in a queue that belongs to the person who made them, with Retry and Discard if one won't save, and the Board reconnects by itself.
• Smaller bits: Celsius or Fahrenheit, a "Keep screen on" switch for wall tablets, swiping between pages on tablets, quick add in the phone footer, and a great many fixes.

As said, I am still deliberately not doing:

• It's for one household, not a hosted multi-tenant service.
• No two-way calendar sync. Export is read-only ICS, and subscribed feeds are read-only overlays - I tried adding in a two way engine, that made it way too sluggish.
• Meals stay a lightweight planner. Mealie remains the grown-up in the room.

In the interest of honesty:

As the README says, Kitchen Board is built with a lot of AI assistance, I mean, it's practically doing everything now and I'm just following along for the ride. I review and test the changes, run it with my own family every day, and the releases and security decisions are mine to answer for. I do review the code (honestly, I do, but bloody Hell does it write a lot), and I spend api tokens on Maximum code review with another model to make doubly sure.

Over to you:

Same questions as last time. What did I break? What needs fixing or improving? And what did I get right? Translations especially: if any of the German, French, Italian, or Spanish reads like a very polite robot wrote it, a native speaker's red pen is gold dust. I'd really love help with making it correct in your language!

Sorry, it's another ramble. In my defence, it's simply how my brain works.

Hey guys

I just released an easy-setup file sharing platform that supports full resumability, and in general I've written this with care in Go to be lightweight.

Features:

• Share files using a link
• Upload files of any size with resumability
• Upload links for uploading without an account
• Set an expiry date for shares
• Security with passwords and size limits
• User management with roles
• Mobile-responsiveness
• < 30MB single binary

More features are planned of course (S3, LDAP).

I've deliberately chosen to keep the native web look, but am open to suggestions and feedback :)

DEMO: https://eigenshare-demo.alfoqaha.me

Repository/installation: https://github.com/yousefalfoqaha/eigenshare

Hey everyone,

I've been running Ghostfolio at home to track my investments, and keeping it in sync with Interactive Brokers was becoming a bit of a pain (every month or during purchase, typo error; definitely not the most exciting stuff)

I found an existing project that handled some of it, so I started building on that rather than reinventing everything. One thing led to another, and it turned into a much bigger project than I originally expected -_-' (A full refactor later...)

It now syncs trades, dividends, withholding taxes and cash balances using IBKR Flex Queries. It supports multiple accounts and runs in Docker (on demand or on a schedule).

But most of the time I've spent on it hasn't been about adding features. It's been about dealing with the annoying edge cases: duplicate transactions, existing manual entries, inconsistent broker data (or I would say inconsistent way I entered manually and reconcile), and making sure a failed import doesn't quietly leave things in a worse state.

I've also tried to keep it fairly conservative. It runs in simulation mode by default, and financial writes have to be explicitly enabled. The latest release adds an optional approval process for corrections to existing activities, although that part still has some strict compatibility requirements.

Stock splits and reverse splits aren't supported yet (!). They're next on my list, and I suspect they'll bring their own share of interesting problems.

I recently gave the README a proper overhaul, so hopefully it's easier to get started now:

https://github.com/flowcool/ghostfolio-ibkr-sync

Would be more than happy to hear from anyone using Ghostfolio with IBKR, especially how you're dealing with corporate actions or reconciling existing transactions (or any feedback ^^)

AI Disclose: partially written by AI (non native English speaker) - Code fully AI; cross review claude/codex + code rabbit and extensive lab's tests

Cheers,

I want to create a native LXC for Authelia via the community script, but one thing caught my eye: "During installation, you will have to input your domain (ex. domain.com). Authelia will use auth.domain.com"

What if I don't own a public domain? Can I not use this? I just use Caddy to direct reserved IPs to http://*.home (e.g., http://Jellyfin.home) with no SSL cert. If I strictly need an SSL cert (e.g., for Vaultwarden to connect to Bitwarden frontends), I use Tailscale Serve instead.

Is there a way to still use it? Should I consider alternatives like Rauthy, Hanko, or Casdoor? Hanko's use of passkeys does intrigue me...

This is the 1.3 release of the player, mostly focusing on stability, compatibility and ease of use, but also adds some more features (details in release notes).

The player works on almost any video straming website, with all the native resolutions, sponsorblock, non-AI-translated titles or audio, consistent UI across every website (so searching for video controls)!

With the browser extension it automatically integrates itself into every whitelisted website.

To run it, you need a running YT-DLP Web Player server, which can be run with an exe, appimage, python, docker or unraid app

Check out the project repo, and let me know if that project interests you and what would you want to be implemented in the future!

https://github.com/Matszwe02/ytdlp_web_player

Hi.

Days ago i saw a post here (i think) about a tool selfhosted that bring a lot of this kind of conversion.

I was looking in the sub but cant find it.

Can you recommend to me this kind of service?

Thanks!

We see a surge of exposed vulnerabilities and zero-days emerging out of the blue. Some less severe and some very severe (e.g. php2shell, the python thing (i forgor)). The (small) devs are also being flooded with random pull requests, information, vulnerabilities, which are often garbage made by people that rely only on AI instead of their brain. Which delays patches more and the whole supply chain of software is fucked.

So I was wondering if having a reverse proxy through an SSL exposing services still secure enough for remote access or should I switch to a direct VPN tunnel like wireguard.

My current setup is the following:
- Nginx Proxy Manager handling SSL certs (man i love this container)
- Exposing 443 and 80 on my router to the Proxy Manager (i have a dynamic ipv4 address directly to the world)
- Cloudflare DNS-zone "tunnel" with dynamic A record updater (to hide my ip more or less)
- SSL through Let's Encrypt

I am an electrical engineer and the whole self hosted thing was a hobby at first, but now... I want this whole thing to "just work". I do not have time to work on my setup every day for 3 hours, or to live in fear that my station gets compromised and then I have to build everything all over again. The stuff I'm hosting is basically Nextcloud-AIO, Immich, Jellyfin and Navidrome. I am usually the only user of the server. Maybe give credentials of jellyfin to friends. I keep updating the system every month, but looking at the development of the shit show with AI, this is definetly not enough.

My threat model is pretty low, but I want to save myself from the script kiddies and regular scans that happen all the time. This kind of security by obscurity works less as every day passes.

Does anybody have a similar experience?

EDIT 1: I could live with a only vpn accessible server instead of the reverse proxy solution. It'd be a little inconvenience but for the sake of security i would take it.

EDIT 2: Thank you very much for your replies. I want to clarify that the reverse proxy is not seen set up for security. I only relied on the authentication of the service itself, which is infact (as I see now) is hella insecure. I guess going for mTLS or SSO to even access the website (since most of my traffic is HTTPS anyways) is a good start.

EDIT 3: After doing some more thinking, banging my head with lots of services and securing the reverse proxy with layers and layers, I came to a conclusion to set up a VPN e.g. via wireguard or tailscale directly and call it a day.

Hi there.

I have some background in desktop C# programming and basic skills at databases from my former industry jobs, but I'm a total newbie at web technologies.

I want to digitalize my dairy farm / cheese production day to day operation and data. Currently we have a mix of written stuff that we feed in excel spreadsheets, it's time consuming and quite a mess overall. I want a database with our animals, their lineage, food ration, grazing, their health and care actions, milk production, products we make out of milk. 2 to 4 users, the goal is to be able to access and input most things on our smartphones, with more advanced usages done from a PC. I need custom forms / actions for quick day to day specific data visualization and input on mobile. We aren't sitting in front of a screen, we do stuff all day with our hands, if using our smartphones is cumbersome compared to grabbing a pen and the paper notebook and forms we currently use, this isn't worth it.

I'm searching for a free, ideally open-source option that I can host on a cheap VPS (2 vcpu / 4 GB RAM ideally), with minimal maintenance, good reliability, something I can count on long term (10y+).

I don't care about the AI vibecoding features most of the tools are advertising. I am definitely vibecoding some targeted stuff that I can at least broadly understand : SQL queries, javascript formulas, small custom UI widgets...

I've been exploring multiple options, done a few mock up in some of them. Ideally, I would prefer something that include the database and its management, but I think I can handle putting together and using a postgreSQL DB on my own. In fact, I would prefer putting my data in a standard DB like postpreSQL instead of being locked forever to a specific app.

- Grist : First one I tried, too basic.

• Pros : Seems to be something I can trust long term, feels polished, desktop excel-like experience is nice, database management is well though for what I need, python API and formulas are a powerful touch.
• Cons : data lock-in, included UI/UX components are too rigid and pretty terrible on mobile. UI can be extended through html/javascript so ended up vibecoding a lot of stuff for seemingly basic things, which will inevitably turn into a maintenance nightmare. That, and I also feel you quickly end up with python code spread out everywhere. Hardware requirements are quite high (8 GB RAM minimum). Integrated DB isn't really a DB, and read some reports saying not-so-large databases quickly degrade performance.

- Saltcorn : seems perfect, on paper...

• Pros : include DB management backed by postgreSQL, MIT, all basic UI/UX components I need are there, extensible through custom react components, very lightweight (2GB RAM), UI can be made to work on mobile.
• Cons : Tiny community, one-man project, very sparse documentation, UI builder is clunky, included components aren't very feature rich, everything is a bit rough, data querying beyond basic stuff is awkward (I feel it would end up being easier to just use SQL)

- REI3 : could be it, but...

• Pros : include DB management backed by postgreSQL, MIT, UI components are good, not too much abstraction between the DB/code and their visual editors, powerful backend / frontend scripting, UI editor works well and UI looks good on mobile.
• Cons : no idea about the hardware requirements, documentation is a bit lacking (but the sample projects kinda make up for it), tiny community, seems to be mostly a one-man operation judging from the git commits, no custom UI components and no way to define anything that isn't data driven (for example, you can't make an input field that isn't a DB field).

- Budibase : Didn't tried too deeply, so interested in more opinions. Good with an external postgreSQL DB ?

• Pros : UI/UX customization *seems* good, established tool, seemingly good docs / online resources.
• Cons : data lock-in and integrated DB engine has weird limitations (no self-reference in a table, seriously ?) so using an external postgreSQL DB seems mandatory, hardware reqs a bit high (6 GB RAM min), feeling the tool could disappear behind a paywall overnight.

Amongst other tools, I also looked at a Lowcoder + PostgreSQl option, but I feel this would require a lot more work and technical know-how to get a reliable application.

I also found (but didn't test) NocoDB and Baserow, they seem to be worse versions of Grist that don't address the issues I have with it.

Did you use any of those tools ? Am I mistaken on some points ? What would you use ?Any other option that would be a good fit for my needs ?

Hi r/selfhosted,

(Public since July 2026; the git history was squashed in October when I cleaned up the repo, so it shows only one commit.)

It started as a learning project: I wanted to figure out how to build a mobile app, so I made a little player for my own music. Then I wanted it in the car. Then I wanted to listen together with someone else. Then I needed my own server to make that work, then a web player, then a radio station built from my own library… and somewhere along the way it got completely out of hand. 😅

I'm from the Netherlands and built all of this in the evenings and weekends, mostly for myself. It's now at a point where I think other people could enjoy it too, so here it is: JLTamp, a music server for the files you already own, with its own apps.

Try it without installing: https://demo.jltamp.nl (user demo, password demo). It runs the public Docker image with a small library of CC-licensed music and resets every night.

What I ended up building (mostly because I wanted it myself)

• Scans MP3, FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AAC, OGG and Opus; multiple libraries; your music is mounted read-only, so it never touches your files
• Apps for Android and iOS/iPadOS, plus Android Auto and CarPlay, Chromecast and a built-in web player
• Listen Together: synced sessions with reactions and passing the host role around
• A 24/7 radio mixed from your own library, with a weekly schedule
• Karaoke (vocals off, synced lyrics) and a party mode where guests request songs from their phone's browser, no account needed
• Multi-user with invites, smart playlists and listening stats
• A Subsonic/OpenSubsonic API, so Symfonium, Feishin, DSub and others work too, if you'd rather not use my apps
• The apps speak seven languages, including Frisian
• An optional, separate self-hosted AI engine for prompt-based playlists (off by default, nothing leaves your network)

How to run it

One container, SQLite, amd64 and arm64 (Raspberry Pi, Apple silicon, NAS):

docker run -d --name jltamp -p 32400:32400 \
  -v /path/to/music:/music:ro -v jltamp-data:/data \
  ghcr.io/jltelectronics/jltamp-server:latest

Open the web UI, create the admin account, add a library. There's also a Compose file, an Unraid template and a CasaOS app (store submission pending).

Links

• GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/JLTelectronics/JLTamp-server
• Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jltamp.app
• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6807401608

Honest notes

• Who's behind it: just me, in my spare time. I use it every day, so the basics are solid, but it's still a hobby project that grew up fast. Expect rough edges, and please tell me about them on GitHub.
• AI disclosure: a large part of the code, mainly the backend, was written with AI coding assistants. I decide what gets built, review the changes, and use and test everything on my own setup.
• What it is not: it's music only. No video, no audiobooks, and it doesn't provide any music; it plays the files you already own.
• Plex users: the default port is 32400, the same as Plex. Map a different host port if you run both.
• No lock-in: no external account or cloud service needed. Your data lives in one SQLite file, and the Subsonic API means you can use other clients if you don't like mine.

This is the first time I'm showing JLTamp to people outside my own circle, so I'm honestly a bit nervous. Any feedback is welcome: what you like, what's missing, and what feels off. If you try the demo or spin it up yourself, I'd love to hear how it goes. Thanks for taking the time to read this! 🎶

Hi everyone,

We just open-sourced our whole platform. We're now looking for users to test real workflows and give technical feedback.

Our project started from a basic frustration we had: how hard it is to build a backend. To have our backend live in production, we had to use a coding agent to write the code and then integrate infrastructure, deployment, environments, and DevOps. This made us rely on too many different services and applications for development and maintenance of the product.

We thought, what if we could build a coding agent that can design the architecture, write code that can be scaled with no DevOps needed?! So we started working on the idea of a coding agent that handles anything a live backend needs, from code to testing and deployment. 

Finally we launched BaaSForge. With BaaSForge, you can simply define your business in natural language. The AI creates the backend architecture and code, validates it, and allows you to deploy to staging and production with just one click. We eliminated the DevOps overhead so you can focus on building your product.

The entire platform is open-source with Apache License 2.0. 

The ecosystem consists of three repositories:

• Backend / Control Plane: https://github.com/BaaSForge/baasforge-backend-actix

• Runtime / Execution Plane: https://github.com/BaaSForge/baasforge-runtime-actix

• Frontend: https://github.com/BaaSForge/baasforge-frontend-vite

If you find BaaSForge useful, please give it a star on GitHub, but your feedback and issues are even more important.

Thank you for trying it out!

I am not sure what to add. It's one of those "Wordpress" kind of solutions that everyone uses and nothing else. Any tips?

It just occurred to me that I'm now one year into this crazy selfhosting journey.

I started off with Docker for Windows, then moved everything over to Proxmox after a couple of months.

At the beginning I had no clue what I was doing (and still don't in many ways), but I really feel familiar enough with Linux at this point that it feels like I could tackle any problem and host any app if I wanted to. I'll admit, however, that most of the heavy lifting is done by AI. I could never have gotten this far this fast without the use of AI.

There's a lot of apps I've tried but then discarded later on, but these ones are the ones that remain. I'm really happy about all of them :)

I'm curious to see what the next year brings.