Take Control of Your Data

Self-Hosting Navidrome: Personal Music Streaming Server (Spotify Alternative) Spotify costs $12/month, owns the relationship between you and your music, and can remove albums from your library without notice. If you’ve built a music collection over the years — ripped CDs, purchased albums from Bandcamp, curated FLAC files — Navidrome turns that collection into your own streaming service, accessible from any device, anywhere. Navidrome is a lightweight, open-source music server written in Go. It scans your music library, reads metadata, serves a modern web interface, and speaks the Subsonic API — which means dozens of polished mobile and desktop apps work with it out of the box. It runs comfortably on a Raspberry Pi Zero, handles libraries with hundreds of thousands of tracks, and uses around 30-50MB of RAM for typical collections. ...

Managing a media library manually is tedious. Tracking new episodes, finding quality upgrades, organizing files — it all adds up. The Arr stack automates the entire pipeline: from request to download to organized library, ready for streaming. This guide walks you through deploying the complete Arr stack with Docker Compose, connecting all the pieces, and getting automated media management running on your server. What Is the Arr Stack? The “Arr” ecosystem is a collection of open-source applications that work together: ...

Automating Docker Updates: Watchtower vs Diun vs Manual Strategies Your homelab is running smoothly. Twenty containers, all humming along. Then a CVE drops for one of your images, and you realize you haven’t updated anything in three months. Docker containers don’t update themselves. Unlike desktop apps with auto-update prompts or Linux packages with apt upgrade, containers stay pinned to whatever image you pulled at deploy time. Without a strategy, your self-hosted stack slowly drifts into a graveyard of outdated software. ...

Self-Hosting Gitness (Harness Open Source): Modern Git Hosting with Built-In CI/CD Most self-hosted Git solutions make you bolt on CI/CD as an afterthought. You set up Gitea, then add Woodpecker or Drone, configure webhooks, manage two sets of credentials, and pray the integration doesn’t break during updates. Gitness — now officially Harness Open Source — takes a different approach. It’s a single binary that ships Git hosting, CI/CD pipelines, code review, secret scanning, and cloud developer environments in one package. Born as the next generation of Drone CI, it inherits Drone’s container-native pipeline philosophy while adding a complete source control layer on top. ...

Self-Hosting LanguageTool: Grammar Checker API with Docker Every writing tool wants to phone home. Grammarly reads everything you type. Google Docs analyzes your documents on their servers. Even browser extensions quietly ship your text to cloud APIs for grammar checking. If you write anything sensitive — legal documents, medical notes, proprietary code comments, personal journals — that’s a problem. LanguageTool is an open-source grammar, style, and spell checker that supports over 30 languages. It powers grammar checking in LibreOffice, and its commercial cloud service competes directly with Grammarly. But unlike Grammarly, you can run your own instance. Your text never leaves your network, you get unlimited checks with no word caps, and you can plug it into browser extensions, text editors, and custom applications via a clean REST API. ...

Self-Hosting Weblate: Continuous Localization Platform Localization is one of those things that’s easy to ignore until it blocks a release. You’ve got translators waiting on developers to export strings, developers waiting on translators to finish, and a spreadsheet somewhere that nobody trusts anymore. Meanwhile your French translation is three versions behind and the German one has 47 fuzzy entries nobody’s reviewed. Weblate is an open-source continuous localization platform that plugs directly into your Git workflow. Translators work in a web UI, changes get committed back to your repository automatically, and you can see translation status at a glance across every language. It’s used by over 2,500 projects including LibreOffice, phpMyAdmin, and Fedora — so it handles real scale. ...

Traefik vs Caddy vs Nginx Proxy Manager: Reverse Proxy Showdown 2026 Every self-hoster hits the same wall: you’ve got a dozen services running on different ports, and you want clean URLs with HTTPS. You need a reverse proxy. The question is which one. Traefik, Caddy, and Nginx Proxy Manager are the three most popular choices in the self-hosting world. They all solve the same core problem — route app.yourdomain.com to the right container with automatic SSL — but they do it very differently. ...

Self-Hosting Diun: Docker Image Update Notifications You’re running twenty Docker containers. One of them just got a critical security patch upstream. How long until you notice? If you’re using Watchtower, the answer is “automatically — it’ll update itself.” But automatic updates aren’t always what you want. Maybe you run a database that needs careful migration steps. Maybe you’ve been burned by a breaking change at 3 AM. Maybe you just want to know before you act. ...

Docker Volume Management: Backups, Migration, and Best Practices You’ve got a dozen containers running — Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Paperless-ngx, databases. Each one stores data in Docker volumes. But can you actually back them up? Migrate them to a new server? Clean up the dead weight? If you already understand the difference between volumes and bind mounts, this guide picks up where that leaves off. We’re covering the operational side: how to protect, move, and maintain your Docker volumes in production. ...

Self-Hosting Budibase: Low-Code Platform for Internal Tools Every company has That Spreadsheet. The one that started as a quick tracker and evolved into a mission-critical monster with 47 tabs, three people who understand the formulas, and a prayer that nobody accidentally deletes row 4. Budibase turns those spreadsheets into actual applications — with forms, tables, automations, and role-based access — without requiring you to be a full-stack developer. It’s an open-source low-code platform that lets you build internal tools on top of your existing data sources (PostgreSQL, MySQL, REST APIs, Google Sheets, or its own built-in database). ...