Over the past few years, I’ve been building a personal home server to centralize my digital life and experiment with self-hosted services. The goal is to have a secure, manageable, and mostly automated infrastructure that I can access both locally and remotely. Here’s a summary of what I’m running today:
Photo Gallery
- Immich – My main photo storage and gallery solution. It’s fast, modern, and keeps all my images organized without relying on third-party cloud providers.
Media Library
- Jellyfin – I use Jellyfin as an alternative to Plex for streaming movies and TV series. It’s completely self-hosted and supports multiple devices.
Remote Access
- WireGuard – A lightweight and secure VPN that allows me to access my home network when I’m outside. This makes all services accessible securely from anywhere.
Password Management
- Vaultwarden – My self-hosted password manager. It keeps all credentials safe and centralized, with easy multi-device access.
Reverse Proxy / Public Access
- Pangolin – Handles routing and making specific services publicly accessible. While slightly complex to configure, it has excellent documentation.
- Alternative options: Traefik or Nginx.
Document Management
- Paperless – For scanning, indexing, and storing important documents.
- Alternative growing project: Papra.
Dashboard / Homepage
- Glance – A personalized homepage showing system status, links, and quick access to services.
Container Management
- Portainer – To manage all Docker containers and stacks easily, with a clean web interface.
Setting up this stack has been a rewarding experience in self-hosted infrastructure, networking, and automation. It allows me to experiment safely with new services, maintain control over my data, and create a personal cloud environment without relying on external providers.
In future posts, I plan to dive deeper into individual services, how I configure them, and tips for running a secure and reliable home server.