Postgres vs SQLite for Home Lab Apps
SQLite is brilliant until you need concurrent writes, replication, or online migrations. Here's the actual line where Postgres earns its keep.
Tag: self-hosting
All the articles with the tag "self-hosting".
SOPS + age: Secrets in Git
Stop the .env-in-1Password dance. SOPS encrypts secrets per-key, age provides modern crypto, and git stores them safely. Here's how to ship it without footguns.
Self-Host a Local AI Coding Workhorse
Self-host Gemma 4 or Qwen3-Coder via Ollama or llama.cpp in Docker, then let Claude delegate the grunt work to it. Free tokens, zero code leakage.
WebAuthn & Passkeys for Sysadmins
Passkeys finally killed passwords for real users. Here's what WebAuthn actually is under the hood, and how to roll passkeys out on your self-hosted services.
Give Your AI Agent a Cheap Intern
Stop burning expensive AI tokens on boring grunt work. The overseer/workhorse pattern routes mechanical tasks to a cheap model and saves more than you'd think.
Borg vs Duplicacy: Dedup Backup Wars
Borg is open-source classic with SSH targets. Duplicacy has lock-free multi-source magic but commercial GUI. Here's which backup tool to pick.
Owntracks + Home Assistant: Private Location Tracking
Stop feeding Google your daily commute. OwnTracks + MQTT broker + Home Assistant gives you real presence detection without the surveillance capitalism overhead.
KVM/QEMU/libvirt: CLI Workflows
virt-manager is fine, but real homelab automation lives on the command line. virt-install, virsh, cloud-init — provision VMs in seconds, not click-by-click.
BirdNET-Pi for Self-Hosted Bird Identification
Turn a Raspberry Pi and a cheap USB mic into a self-hosted bird ID station using BirdNET-Pi and Cornell ML audio models running entirely locally offline.
Claude Code + SearXNG: Private Web Search
Wire a self-hosted SearXNG instance into Claude Code via a Bash wrapper for private, scriptable web search — and when to use it vs the built-in tool.
rclone vs Restic: Sync vs Backup
rclone copies and syncs files to cloud storage. Restic does deduplicated encrypted snapshots. Confusing them costs you restores at 2 AM.
Scrypted vs Frigate for Self-Hosted Cameras
Scrypted bridges your IP cameras to HomeKit and Google Home. Frigate adds AI object detection on your own hardware. Here's how to pick — or run both at once.