Christmas Projects

You might wonder what kind of self-hosting project you could do this weekend or during the holidays.

Here are some ideas particularly for beginners, that scale nicely from taking up your entire holidays to just spend a few hours.

Pi-hole is very famous and provides an all-in-one project you can set up on a Raspberry Pi or a VM that runs on your network and blocks all kinds of Ads for devices on your network.

From your TV to phone, any size device that uses your network DNS server will be covered by it.

You’ll find plenty of tutorials on how to set up Pi-hole on their official website and people’s private blogs for other languages.

It’s easy to set up and everyone at your home will benefit from it. To spend some more time on it, you can start tweaking your Pi-hole settings, add new blocklists and learn about all the domains your network talks to.

If you like to be less GUI oriented, you can also try Blocky as an alternative.

Jellyfin is a media server that allows you to store and organise your media as well as streaming it to your devices.

The nice thing about it, if you have a NAS at home that can run any form of OCI/Docker containers, you probably don’t need any additional device. You can of course also install it in a VM or on a raspberry Pi, just keep in mind, that films, and shows will take up quite some storage.

Time spend on Jellyfin basically scales mostly on how much time you want to spend on digitalising your existing DVDs and Blue-rays. Jellyfin can collect most metadata from services like TheMovieDB so there isn’t too much chores to do. You can also decide to dive into the *aar-ecosystem and spend your time in building your very personal *arr-stack.

Paperless-ngx - Organise your paperwork

Paperless-ngx is an amazing and incredibly boring Document organisation software. Boring is meant in the best way possible. Paperless does amazing OCR, uses a very traditional form of Machine Learning to figure out how to categorise your documents and otherwise just does its job.

Just like Jellyfin it’s very easy to set up using Docker on your NAS or a Raspberry Pi. Compared to films, you can go easy on storage, just keep in mind, that your document might be very valuable for you, so you want to make sure you do regular backups and follow the 3-2-1 backup rule. This is not a suggestion, this is an order!

The amount of time you spend on Paperless is mainly defined by how much paper you are about to digitalise or how well you want to integrate and automate Paperless.

While the digitalise part is quite obvious (take your paper, scan it, upload it to Paperless), the automate part might be interesting. From configuring your scanner to drop documents into the ingest folder of your Paperless instance, to fetching emails and label them automatically to creating workflows in Paperless that assign additional things based on labels or correspondents, this is something you can spend hours on fine tuning.

Conclusion

There you have 3 nice holiday projects for beginning your self-hosting journey. Some would even talk about “Sysadmin-Cosplay”. Learning some new technical skills while setting up actually useful services at home.

And it doesn’t really matter if you are a busy parent that only a few hours to spare or a teenager with too much free time. You can easily scale these projects to your time budget and they are all low maintenance in the long run.

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!