Home Lab Links

Unless otherwise noted, all projects listed are Free Open Source Software. Some projects may be commercial but with a free open source self-hosted version, other projects may be free and open source but also offer a we-can-host-it-for-you paid service.

This page provides links to a bunch of popular projects that have so far gotten mentioned during our meetups. You can find a more exhausted list on the awesome-selfhosted Github repository, and the dockerholics repository. Please add your own links when you bring them up during our meetups!

Hardware

Operating systems with a one click install system

The OS gets fully installed on a system, and then offers a management website for installing additional services without needing the user to run commands.

Home Assistant - HAOS provide Home Assistant for home automation, and handles one click install "add-ons"
YunoHost - A one click installer dashboard, very easy to approach
Unraid - Commercial, a very complete self-hosted OS that can manage
Proxmox - Commercial, geared more towards running virtual machines

New to Linux and self-hosting

explainshell.com - Paste in a Linux command, it tells you what it does
Intro to self-hosting - An ok guide to get going, slightly dated
Docker 101 - Another ok guide on getting started with Docker containers and Docker Compose
Self-hosted Cookbook - A repository of docker-compose configurations for major services

Management and monitoring tools

Portainer - Commercial with a free version, web UI to monitor and manage Docker containers

Network tools

AdGuard - Commercial with a FOSS version, ad blocking
Pi-Hole - Ad blocking, installable independently on a Raspberry Pi or as a container
Ubiquiti Unifi - Super commercial, the affordable network and wifi hardware solution most people use.
Uptime Kuma - Web UI that provides uptime status for stuff on your network

File sharing

Syncthing - A really easy to use tool that syncs files between devices

Media

Plex - Commercial with free version, media manager and client players
Jellyfin - An open source media manager and client players
Arr - A list of tools for automating the procurement of legally downloadable content

Backups

Kopia - An easy-to-use backup tool for users
BorgBackup - A more sysadmin backup tool designed to back up whole systems

Photos

Immich - Basically a copy of Google Photos

Social media

Mastodon - Open source decentralized federated microblogging platform, it's not Twitter
Pixelfed - Open source decentralized federated photo sharing platform, it's not Instagram

Smart home

Members of the Open Home Foundation
- Home Assistant - The best open source home automation hub/dashboard/automation thing
- ESPHome - A system to control ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers for home automation
- Zigbee2MQTT - A more robust Zigbee management tool than what Home Assistant has built in
- WLED - Cover your home in pretty LEDs (PS1 has workshops!)
- Music Assistant - Music library manager for your offline and online music sources
MQTT - A behind the scenes services needed by different home automation tools
Tasmota - Alternative firmware for ESP8266 and ESP32 based devices with easy configuration using web UI
Frigate - Security camera NVR with real-time object detection
HyperHDR - Doing that thing where you put LEDs behind your TV

Smart home hardware

Home Assistant Green - A really affordable system to run Home Assistant, but it's not superfast and has limited add-on support
Zigbee sticks - Double check sticks against the supports sticks list for ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT
- Intel white paper on USB port interference - Always use a 1+ ft USB extension cable for Zigbee USB sticks
- Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 - No frills Zigbee stick
- SMLIGHT - Zigbee USB sticks and network sticks
- SONOFF P and SONOFF E

Zigbee devices
- Aqara - Budget Zigbee devices that mostly work fine without their hub
- Philips Hue - What's considered the best fancy color lightbulbs
- SONOFF - Everything
- IKEA - Dirt cheap
Wifi devices
- CloudFree - Store offers a multitude of commercial devices that have been taken apart and pre-flashed with local only open source firmware
- Athom - Store with hardware made for FOSS firmware, customer service is meh
- Apollo Automation - Designed for FOSS and Home Assistant hardware, air quality and presence detection sensors
Z-Wave
- Zooz 800 USB stick - Recommended Z-Wave stick
Home Assistant Voice - Open source hardware voice activated assistant replacement to Google Home or Amazon Alexa
OpenEVSE - Open source hardware EV charger
Rainforest Eagle 3 - Hub to connect to your ComEd power meter that talks to HA

Searching

SearXNG - A free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.

Local AI LLM

LM Studio - A quick to get into local LLM inference server and desktop UI
Ollama - Bare-bones easy to use local LLM inference server with an API
Open WebUI - Self-hosted web frontend for interacting with LLM APIs that are either in the cloud or locally hosted

Productivity

LanguageTool - Commercial with an open source version, proofreading in your browser

Email

VPN

Security

Nginx Proxy Manager - Securely expose your local services to the internet with the security of SSL

Not an overwhelming number of useful Linux commands

apropos - A quick search through descriptions of other commands to find what you need
history - Show the last 100 commands you entered
locate - Search for files
sudo -s - Instead of running 1 command as root, you can go into a root session until you type exit
htop - System monitor showing CPU and memory usage for each process