The only one I haven’t seen mentioned here that is a requirement for me is OPNsense. I’ve been using it for a couple years, and pfSense before that for a very long time. Never going back to commercial routers and their shitty / buggy / backdoored software. I highly recommend OPNsense over pfSense for the UI improvements alone, but there are other reasons to use/support OPNsense over pfSense.

On my network it handles internet firewall, internal firewall, and all routing across 5 VLANs and between two internet gateways. It does 1-1 NAT for my public IPs, inbound VPN, outbound VPN for my *arr stack, and RDNS blocklists with the data source being a script I wrote that merges from several sources and deduplicates the list. It is my internal certificate authority (I don’t miss you at all, Windows CA), DHCP for the guest wifi, and does pihole-like ad blocking via DNS for my entire network. And it does all that running in a VM with 2GB of RAM, of which it only uses about 60% on my install.

It is an incredibly powerful tool, not terribly difficult to learn, has a pretty damn good UI for FOSS, and in my opinion is a fantastic foundation for a complex home network / homelab. Unlike pfSense, which corrupted itself twice over the years I ran it, it has never let me down. And every update has been painless over the years.

For me:

• Card/CalDAV baikal : so that I can sync my calendar and address book across phone, tablet, workstation, and laptop
• Messaging prosody/synapse : private chatting with family.
• File sync Nextcloud : for access to various files. This is the only one that has worked consistently for me. Syncthing et al would constantly lose connection and the file I needed wouldn’t be there. Works fantastic for syncing Joplin notes.
• VPN wireguard : to access things remotely and securely
• Audiobooks audiobooksheld : I have a ridiculously large audio book library and enjoy listening to them when driving. This way I don’t have to preload my phone.
• Ebooks calibreweb : another large library. I have separate instances for different types: Magazines, regular books, RPG/gamebooks.
• Version control forgejo : for coding and creative writing projects.
• bookmarks shaarli : I find myself using this less and less. I use Firefox’s built-in sync, so I’m thinking about switching to separating selfhosting that instead of shaarli.
• Photos Synology : looking forward to immich getting stable. Once they get past regular breathing changes I’ll move over to that.

I have stopped using most of the services that got me into selfhosting. Things like rss and wikis. I try new things from time to time but kill them if I don’t find myself using them regularly or if the maintenance cost is more than the value add.

Opnsense

Vaultwarden

Email

Home assistant

Emby

Gitea

Paperless-ngx

Firefox

Please not these posts again

This thread is pinned for a reason: https://lemmy.world/post/60585

Pi-hole. Get rid of at least some ads on the network level. Maybe add unbound for a faster DNS response.

No one’s mentioned Forgejo yet? Solid git and artifact repository.

Nextcloud.

I was hosting nextcloud at home for years. Then when I worked in a Datacenter I got to host some servers there from free so I set up a two-node proxmox with nextcloud and some other stuff. Now I don’t work there anymore and I really felt the hole nextcloud left, no more notes syncing for notes, tasks, calendar, podcasts no more place to upload my photos from my phone … So now I’m hosting nextcloud at home again.

I also host jellyfin which is nice but if I don’t have it doesn’t actively hamper my workflow.

• Pihole (if that service goes down, everyone in my house gets mad at me)
• Jellyfin

Everything else is a nice to have, not essential

The arr family with a torrent client is great for feeding Jellyfin. If you are a developer, you can host your own shit there too. Game servers for playing with family and friends (so far Minecraft, Terraria, Project Zomboid, V Rising). I like to host a bunch of different telegram bots I wrote for fun. Discord bots are another interesting side. I also run some automation runners for helping out with testing, building and deploying my projects.

Focus on your needs and what you want to improve of your online life, there is probably a project you can self host for it.

Jellyfin/Plex like many have mentioned.

I personally like Syncthing for petty much everything else. For general file syncing of course. But also with Joplin pointed to a synced directory for notes. With keepass as a password vault. With synced config directories for some apps across devices like newsboat for RSS, and neomutt for email. I also used to use it with rtorrent via a watch directory, though I currently am using a seedbox for that purpose.

VPN (openvpn/wireguard) is a good idea if you want to access your services outside your local network, without exposing them all globally.

1. Samba (I can move files now, sweet!)

2. Jellyfin (I can watch stuff, sweet!)

3. Qbittorrent-wireguard (for pirating copyrighted material from the internet illegally)

4. Somesuch Wireguard solution (for accessing the backend and doin stuff)

5. A proxy somewhere else

The rest is extra. This gets my usual goals completed pretty well.

Depends on what your usecase is for what is “essential.”

I think keeping household documents, taxes, medical bills, etc… In a local only paperless-ngx instance is quite essential to the organization of a household where everything is searchable and able to be organized on multiple levels compared to a simple document folder on 1 computer.

Having a document or self-hosted wiki with an in - case - of - death document that gets backed up in an encrypted, but accessible by family place is probably the most “essential” thing.

Immich/PhotoPrism/whatever you use for image backup. Cloud providers are snooping through your shit.

Plex/Jellyfin for streaming

Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd, qBittorrent to support the streaming service(s)

Depends on the situation of course, but for us:

• immich: family photos are important
• docker + ssh: we enjoy hobbying with code, nerds be nerds
• samba: a file sharing protocol that works on all of our things

It’s not very exciting, but: Network UPS Tools (NUT).

Keep everything in good shape in the event of a power outage.

In terms of most used for me, it would be:

• Nextcloud: contains my contacts, calendar, and photos synced with my phone, as well as access to files on my server from any web browser.
• Home assistant: both automated and remote control of your lights, thermostat, etc.
• Audiobookshelf: only really useful if you have an audiobook collection
• Vault Warden: self-hosted bitwarden. Not really all that important to self-host, since a bit warden’s clients are open source.
• Frigate: only useful if you have security cameras.
• Navidrome: only useful if you have a music collection.
• Jellyfin: only useful if you have a movie / TV collection.