Best home servers (for free)
Nathan Taylor looks at the server apps that are worth your time.
Throughout the course of this year, we’ve been walking through the process of installing server apps for your home network. We’ve covered how to use Windows Services for Linux to run Linux server apps on a Windows PC; we’ve looked at using Docker to make that process astronomically easier; we’ve looked at how you can make those services accessible from outside your home network.
So now, we thought we’d take a look at the apps that are actually worth running on your home network. There are plenty of apps we could cover here, and we’ve excluded ones we’ve covered elsewhere like ownCloud, Kodi and Plex, but here are six of our top suggestions for you to try out.
diaspora*
diasporafoundation.org Unofficial Docker image: hub. docker.com/r/koehn/diaspora/ You know what many people love? Facebook. You know what many people don’t love? Having their every move, every click, every personal detail catalogued and sold off to the highest bidder. For that reason, self-hosted social networks are becoming ever more popular – a way to have the sharing and communications of public social networks, without all the privacy invasion. You can create your own server (usually called a pod), and invite only your friends to it.
The most popular solution is diaspora*, a tool that essentially creates a private Facebook. It supports posts and chat in a similar fashion to Facebook, although it has nowhere the app support of Facebook.
Unfortunately, diaspora* has neither an official Docker image nor an official mobile app – though many third party mobile apps are available. The Docker image linked above can be complicated to set up since you have to configure your own database and redis, so if you’re looking for something simpler, you can also try the chat-centric Movim ( movim.eu) or Facebooklike Friendica ( friendi.ca), both of which have official Docker images and are much easier to get started with because of it.
Subsonic
www.subsonic.org
Subsonic is a very popular DIY Spotify service. It can take your existing collection of MP3s and other music and stream them to devices around your home or across the internet. It can stream to web browsers, and there are official and unofficial apps for Chromecast, iOS, Android, Windows and MacOS. It also supports streaming to DLNA devices – though this is only available in the paid Premium version (along with a number of other features, such as podcast support).
The big thing you’re missing out on, when compared to a service like Spotify or Apple Music, is recommendations and third-party playlists, but Subsonic does let you import playlists and create your own. You can of course play songs by artist and album as well.
You don’t need to use WSL for Subsonic: there’s a fairly straightforward Windows server app you can download from the official site. All the configuration is done through the web browser
interface, accessed by default at http://localhost:4040.
Lychee
lychee.electerious.com Semi-official Docker image: hub. docker.com/r/kdelfour/lycheedocker/
Lychee is a network-based photo management system, designed to let you view, manage and share your photos through a web interface. Think Flickr, but self-hosted and as private as you want it to be.
You can install Lychee on Windows since it is entirely PHP-based, but the easiest solution we’ve found is to use the semi-official Docker image linked above, which has all dependencies built in as well as a pre-configured database. You can access it in a web browser using localhost as the address, then enter localhost as the database location and lychee as the database name, username and password. After that, you can configure your photo directories and manage and view your collection from there.
While it does support connections to major cloud service, Lychee unfortunately doesn’t have any official mobile app (and the unofficial ones look dubious). You’ll still have to upload your photos from your mobile to your PC separately. www.minecraft.net/en-us/ download/server (Java edition) or www.minecraft.net/en-us/ download/server/bedrock
(Bedrock edition)
Unofficial Docker image for Java:
hub.docker.com/r/itzg/ minecraft-server; for Bedrock:
hub.docker.com/r/itzg/ minecraft-bedrock-server
If you want to be the most popular Mum or Dad at home, there’s probably no better way than to create a private Minecraft
server for your kids and their friends. That way they can do whatever they want, together, without being annoyed by other people.
It’s fairly straightforward to create a basic Minecraft setup for both the old Java editions and Bedrock editions (you’ll need to use the latter for mobile and console editions of Minecraft), and both will work on Windows. We really like the Docker images provided above, however, since they auto update to the latest version and come with a good configuration. The downside is that you’ll have to use a command line to run it for the first time. Pressing the run button in Docker Desktop won’t work, since Minecraft requires the EULA=True setting to be enabled. So you need to create an image with switches set up, such as using the command line:
DOCKER RUN -E EULA=TRUE ITZG/MINECRAFT-BEDROCKSERVER
Once you do enter a command line with the switches enabled, Docker will create a new image with the switches, and you can start and stop that using the regular buttons in Docker Desktop. There’s much more information on the Docker hub page on switches and other settings.
Nextcloud
Nextcloud.com
Official Docker image: hub. docker.com/_/Nextcloud
Last month we looked at ownCloud, a capable platform for cloud-based file sharing. Nextcloud takes that to the next level. It’s a platform for not just file sharing, but also communication, conferencing and groupware like shared mail, contacts and calendar. It’s a pretty heavy solution for a home user, but it does a lot, and it has full support for mobile clients.
Nextcloud requires Linux, so you’re best off using Docker to set it up, and you’ll probably have to give the Docker page a deep read to get a handle on all the requirements. If you do, however, you’ll have a complete cloud sharing and collaboration platform set up for your personal use.
itsi VideoBridge
jitsi.org
Official Docker image: hub.docker. com/r/jitsi/jvb
For a variety of reasons, most public video conferencing platforms are not secure. They don’t use end-to-end encryption on multi-party chats, which means your Zoom calls, for example, are wide open for monitoring. Jitsi VideoBridge solves that by allowing you to run your own video chat service. Using the Jitsi Meet web or mobile client, along with Jitsi VideoBridge as the server, you can have video conferences that don’t require an outside party to moderate.
While Jitsi Meet is available on all the major platforms, VideoBridge does require Linux. You can set it up on Windows using the Docker image linked. We recommend reading the documentation: this one can be complex to set up, and it will require a very fast internet connection to use.