My homelab started with a single service, and before I knew it, I had a few dozen services running.In reality, I only use a handful of services every day—most of them sit idle or even offline.Add How-To Geek on Google Add as Preferred Source Follow on Google Discover There are a handful of services I keep running all the time.
Some of them are practical; others are just fun.These are 7 Docker containers I'd recommend everyone try at least once.Home Assistant Control over your own smart home Home Assistant is an open-source automation hub that is designed to tie together smart devices from all of the major brands into a single dashboard.
From there, you can control your smart devices, create automations, and even integrate local AI services for a "smarter" smart home.The primary appeal is control.Your automations run locally, so most automations keep running when there is a cloud outage, and you don't have to worry as much about someone exfiltrating your data against your wishes.
Related 7 Home Assistant features I wish I’d started using sooner Long time, no scene.Posts 1 By Adam Davidson It is also just extremely convenient, since it works with most major brands and communication standards, including Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Matter.The only limitation of the Docker container is that you don't get access to HA's built-in apps.
If you want those, you'll need to run Home Assistant in its own VM or bare metal on separate hardware.Uptime Kuma Kuma tells you when something breaks Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted monitor that checks whether your services, websites, and devices are responding.It supports everything from HTTP and TCP to DNS and Docker container status.
It can send alerts to Discord, Telegram, email, and pretty much any other way you want.I don't specifically "look" at Uptime Kuma every day.Most of the time, it runs as a small widget on my dashboard.
If I see green, I ignore it.If something has changed to any other color, it means something has gone wrong that I need to investigate.It is a simple app, but easy to set up and essential once you have more than three or four services.
Pi-hole Block ads and trackers for every device on the network Normally, when a device on your network tries to connect to a website, it sends a request to a DNS server to link a domain (like www.google.com) to its IP address.A Pi-hole works by sitting between the DNS server and all the devices on your network so that specific, undesired DNS requests can be blocked the request ever leaves your network.In practice, that means you can use a Pi-hole to block ads, trackers, and malicious domains before your devices ever have a chance to connect.
It is especially helpful on devices that don't offer as much manual control as a PC, like smart TVs, smart fridges, phones, and IoT devices.To get the Pi-hole running, use the pihole/pihole image.Once it's running, log into your router and change the DHCP DNS to your Pi-hole's IP address.
Portainer Manage every other container with a dashboard Docker is fine as a command-line application, but if you prefer a normal user interface, you can use Portainer.Portainer provides a web interface for Docker that allows you to see all of the containers, images, and volumes on your device.You can start and stop containers, check logs to diagnose a problem, and even run Compose files all from your browser.
You keep this dashboard off the internet, since it effectively has root access to your Docker host.Vaultwarden A password manager you own and control Vaultwarden is a third party, self-hosted server for Bitwarden.It is compatible with all of the usual Bitwarden apps, but the data is stored on your own server.
Besides data control considerations, you also get a few features that are normally paywalled, like Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTP), for free.I'd urge caution when self-hosting Vaultwarden.You are now responsible for creating robust, secure backups of some of your most sensitive data.
You also should use a reverse proxy like Caddy or Nginx Proxy Manager, since the web vault HTTPS to work.Immich Your very own photo library Close Immich is a photo and video library designed to present an alternative to Google Photos.The user experience and features are very similar to Google Photos, and unlike many open-source alternatives, Immich is quite polished.
It even includes optional facial recognition and map view features.The only potential downsides are the hardware requirements.Importing and scanning a large library will take time and use a ton of CPU and RAM.
The facial recognition feature, if activated, can also be pretty demanding.Remember, Immich is a storage solution, a backup solution in and of itself.You should still back up your most important photos and videos to multiple locations to ensure they're not lost in the event of a drive failure.
Jellyfin A streaming service for your own media without a subscription Jellyfin is a free, open-source media server designed for movies and television; it also works with music and audiobooks.In many ways, it is quite similar to Plex, though Jellyfin has paywalled features at all.To get the best performance out of Jellyfin, I'd recommend hosting it on something that supports hardware transcoding, like a small mini PC or a refurbished desktop PC.
Transcoding allows you to convert a video or audio file from one format to another on the fly so that you can stream media to device, even if it doesn't support the file format your media is stored in.Unfortunately, transcoding can also be very demanding on devices that have specialized hardware support, which usually makes Raspberry Pis poor Jellyfin servers.Make sure that your media files follow the Jellyfin naming guide so that the metadata Jellyfin fetches works as it should.
Start with two, grow from there The best homelab is the one you actually maintain.If you try to deploy all seven at once, you'll likely spend your weekend troubleshooting.You should start with Portainer since it makes getting the other services up and running much easier.
From there, a Pi-hole produces immediate results that are satisfying, and Uptime Kuma lets you keep an eye on both without actually opening them up.Once those are working, move on to the heavier services, like Immich and Jellyfin.
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