I recently opened up Immich to upload some photos from my computer when I saw this photo in my memories feed.

It was exactly three years ago that I took my first steps into self-hosting and installed headless Debian on my used Lenovo ThinkCentre. I needed to perch it next to my router so I could physically wire it in for internet access (the router and server have since moved to my desk downstairs).

Anyway, the precarious placement elicited a chuckle, and it occurred to me that now was as good a time as any to think back on the apps that I have since started self-hosting. Here are some of my favorites.

Immich

Of all the apps I self-host now, Immich is probably the one that sees the most use. When my daughter was born, my wife and I knew we wanted a way to share photos with our friends and family that didn’t involve traditional social media apps. There are certainly plenty of cloud-based solutions out there—even some with pretty generous free tiers. I saw recommendations on Reddit about Immich, though, and once I got it set up I was shocked at how full-featured it was.

I’m still impressed that the app has locally-run facial recognition and machine learning baked in. The mobile app is intuitive, and having control over my data allows me to set up my own backup solution.

Audiobookshelf

Audiobookshelf is a recent addition and has replaced Plex for hosting audiobooks. So far I have been pleasantly surprised at how good it is, especially for sourcing metadata about each book. There is an Android app that works well and supports login via OIDC, though my users on iOS all use Prologue. I have listened to several books so far and don’t have any complaints. The Android Auto view works especially well.

Paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx is another really amazing application, though with this one most of all I think the key is that you get out of it what you put in. I am not consistent with scanning all of our documents and periodically end up with a months-long backlog. It’s a great feeling being able to shred most bills, forms and the like and know that I’m still able to reference them if need be. The OCR is great for searching all your documents, and beats manually sifting through stacks of paper!

Syncthing

The last app I’ll mention here is Syncthing. I’m still trying to learn how best to utilize this app as its peer-to-peer model is different than most file sync/backup solutions I’ve used in the past. I have it set up for performing some remote backups, and the thing that strikes me most about this application is how simple it is to get working. No ports to open, no routing or even much networking knowledge to connect two instances and BAM. Files start to flow.

Thanks for reading!