10 Apps for your Homelab in 2022

Containers, Homelab, Self Hosting, Software, Virtualization -

10 Apps for your Homelab in 2022

If you're running a homelab, you may already be running lots of applications for your own personal cloud or to assist in running your homelab stack. If you are just like me, your lab is never complete and your always looking for something else to install and try out. This article will look at some apps you can try out in your lab to increase its maintainability, manage it better or add entirely new functionality to get the most out of your homelab.

1. Grafana + Prometheus + Loki Stack

All applications running in your Homelab will generate logs or metrics for what the service is doing. To collect, store and visualize these metrics, you will need a stack of applications for each component involved. In this stack, Grafana assists with the visualization and alerting of your logs and metrics, Prometheus aggregates your logs and metrics, and Loki is used to ingest log files from your hosts or containers.

Now with each part of the monitoring stack in its application, it is very configurable for any system you are running, allowing you to use different log message formats or protocols. Check out this guide for information on setting up the stack's components and getting logs and metrics into Grafana and open up a range of new things to explore in the world of logging, monitoring and observability. 

2. Portainer

If you are running containers in your homelab, Portainer is a fantastic application to run to get some more administration features over your containers. Through Portainer, you are provided access to the images available more efficiently and run containers with many tools for monitoring and debugging your application workloads all through an easy to to use web dashboard seen below.

The application is built as a single container runtime, making it easy to integrate into any environment. Portainer can connect to many container runtime engines running locally or on cloud providers, including Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and container runtimes.

3. Plex

You may be like many of us with a Homelab and are running some media automation applications to gather or view the files. If you haven't heard of Plex, it is one of the leading free applications to view your media files, including personal videos, music, movies and TV.

You can create a Plex account for free and use the application's essential features. But some features like downloading media onto your mobile devices for offline viewing are paid through a Plex pass subscription. Plex often has lifetime subscriptions to Plex pass so keep an eye on your email and you're likely to get a good deal.

Take note that Plex is an external service you will depend on to use the application. A consequence of this integration means that if Plex goes down for any reason, you may not be able to use Plex features completely. Plex login servers have been going down from time to time, but the overall features and polish you are getting are worth it.

4. Tautulli

Suppose you are running Plex on your Homelab (or will start too soon due to this article). In that case, Tautulli is an excellent addition to your media automation stack to get further insights into what is happening on your media server that extends to the metrics available from Plex.

These metrics provide historical and real-time, providing deep insight into what your users are doing on the server and how you may be able to optimize the server and media to fit the consumption needs better. The analytics provided by Tautulli can help identify if you may be running background tasks at the wrong time for the user's needs or if your resources are just not enough for the type of media and codecs exported by your server.

5. Jellyfin

Another alternative to Plex you may want to consider is a new addition to the open-source application space. Jellyfin provides an entirely open source solution and a similar feature set to Plex without needing external services.

Compared to the other competitors to Plex out there, this is the most polished alternative available. The focus on building it to be open source should be an advantage of the project in the future. We have seen with both Plex and Emby that introducing a business element to the application leads users to lose out on features.

6. Home Assistant

If you want to do any home automation or make your home smart, Home Assistant is the best-in-class open-source application for the use case. This complete solution provides a UI for accessing all your home automation information and automation scheduling/running capabilities.

The platform has almost standard integrations for your smart devices or external services, allowing you to integrate Home Assistant running on your homelab with other devices efficiently.

Home Assistant has many different deployment options, including a manual install, Docker container or the new HassOS image that is the recommended installation solution. This VM ISO comes with everything you need to run Home Assistant and includes an improved way of running all of the Home Assistant integrations more securely with docker containers in the VM.

7. Traefik

Suppose you are running many Docker containers or VMs in your Homelab and want to publish those web services under a domain or with standard features like proxying or SSL. Now you can do this with something like Nginx, but you will need to update these files each time you add a new service or host, which can be hard to manage and lead to mistakes.

That's where Traefik comes in. It provides a dynamic way to create proxy configurations for your Docker containers or static sites.

The dynamic nature of configuration is a strength of Traefik, allowing you to set up common entry points for your services and apply standard headers and middleware such as authentication forwarding. The Traefik docker provider enables you to monitor your Docker services running on a host. When a new container gets created on the docker service, if it is using any Traefik prefixed labels, there's will be used to configure connections between your entry points and your docker services and applications. The below command shows an example of configuring a container Traefik service using labels instead of static configs.

Through this pattern, your proxy configurations are attached to your application container, making managing them a lot easier over time. Check out the Traefik docs for instructions on installing and operating the proxy.

8. Filestash

When you are running a server, you will need to access the files on the host, and it can be inconvenient to navigate, upload and download these files just over CLI. Sometimes, however, it can be better to have a simple UI for accessing these files. Filestash comes in as a lightweight option to use in your administrator toolkit.

The application supports many storage backends making it fit in with any setup you want. Supported backends include local, S3, Git, Google Drive, Backblaze etc.

Filestash has a self-hosted and a SASS offering of the application. You can check out the docs for getting started here.

9. Akaunting

Suppose you are in the market for a highly polished and featured personal or business accounting application Akaunting could be a perfect fit. This application can give you better insights into your financial data and stay on top of some of those invoices or bills.

This application is perfect for anyone running the books of multiple companies, allowing you to separate the finances into their view easily. It also allows you to easily share any reports on the financial data collected so you can share it with the relevant parties. There aren't many options for accounting software that can be self-hosted. So this is a highly polished application you would usually have to pay for to get the same level of features, so it is worth looking into for any use case.

You can find docs for getting started with Akaunting on the following page.

10. FileBrowser

Another good alternative to accessing files on a remote machine like Filestash is FileBrowser. This application provides more features to manage your files with simple file editing and viewing through the browser.

One difference between FileBrowser and Filestash is that this application focuses only on exposing the local filesystem to the application's users. With its additional admin features to add other users with their permissions, it is perfect as an administration utility you can run on your Homelab or Home server host.

You can find documentation for getting started using FileBrowser here.

Wrapping Up

The library of applications you can install onto your homelab or home server keeps growing every year, with new and more polished features available all the time. The best part is that since they are open source, you get a lot of free features.

Hopefully, you have found something good you can use in your lab. Check out this article to learn more about some lessons and mistakes from running my homelab.

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