A self-hosted homelab running on my personal machine (Ryzen 5 5600X / RX 6700 XT), managed entirely with Docker Compose. It covers media, AI, photo and file sync, security, notifications, and a few other things — all running locally and accessible remotely via Tailscale.
The stack is built around a few core pillars:
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Media —> Jellyfin handles video streaming with GPU transcoding. The arr stack (Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, Bazarr) automates media management.
The Portuguese Brazilian subtitles tend to be very thin for more niche shows and movies, so a solution i found was to use AI-powered translation via Ollama, running on a local instance. Although it's not perfect, it's good enough for a few occasions. Lingarr is the tool that manages those translations. I also use Invidious as an open-source front-end for YouTube. -
Music —> Navidrome serves as a music server with lastfm scrobbling and lyrics support via this plugin. Slskd provides access to the Soulseek network for music discovery.
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AI —> Ollama, like i mentioned earlier, runs a local LLM instance and even though i just use for subtitle translation, considering it can be very heavy, it does work like a normal chatbot as well.
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Search engine —> SearXNG is the one i use. It's a self-hosted metasearch engine, i.e., it integrates results from multiple search engines.
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Security -> Caddy acts as a reverse proxy. Tailscale is used as a mesh VPN to allow exclusive access to each service. Pi-Hole is a network-level ad and tracker blocker.
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Infrastructure —> Ntfy handles push notifications. Uptime Kuma monitors service health. Portainer serves as a container management interface. Watchtower as a schedule-based container auto-updater. Dozzle was also added as a log aggregator - making it easier to manage the multiple container's logs.
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Password manager —> Vaultwarden is a self-hosted Bitwarden-compatible password manager. Which is great because it allows me to use the Bitwarden extension on my browser without having to rely on external servers to store my passwords.
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Files & Sync —> Immich for photo management. Syncthing for file sync across devices. Filebrowser for remote file access. Paperless-ngx as a document management and aggregator application. LazyLibrarian allows me to grab metadata for e-books. And Calibre-Web serves as a books management and display service.
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Note-taking -> Joplin is a note-taking application organized by notebooks - it's very simple and straightforward. Affine is an alternative to Joplin with a little more flair for when i'm feeling fancy.
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Minecraft —> Minecraft server powered by Fabric for me and my friends, running via the itzg/minecraft-server image. Unlike the rest of the stack which stays behind Tailscale — Minecraft's raw TCP protocol doesn't play well with the HTTP reverse proxy setup the other services use, so instead i use an exposed port forwarding.
It started with me being fed-up with subscription services, then it became about freedom.. About not wanting to depend on companies that don't share your values, owning your own data, the freedom to share resources with other people, from being tired of the lack of ownership and planned obsolescence from modern tech. There's also undeniably some pure stubbornness to it. The seek of a challenge, the thrill of learning new things while spending hours in debug hell, i live for that.
The same thinking led to my URBS GTFS project. While looking for a Google Maps replacement with decent transit info for Curitiba, i found that URBS (Curitiba's Public Transport System) wasn't on Mobility Database at all - which is the global database standard for open transit data. So I built the feed myself.
I run all these docker containers on a Debian 13 Trixie with LXQt as DE. I use LibreWolf browser. For the very occasional coding i use VSCodium or nano. On my phone i use the AfterlifeOS custom rom, a de-googled and more customizable version of Android. Which is absolutely incredible, specially considering the size of their team. Their main philosophy, NeverDie, is one of the main reasons i like it so much.