Selfhosted

I use my searxng instance several times a day.

DNS server/cache/pihole. If that goes down I can't browse anything.

I also selfhost a SaaS that I built. It's essential to me that it's available to my customers although I don't use it personally.

Tailscale

It's not very exciting, but: Network UPS Tools (NUT).

Keep everything in good shape in the event of a power outage.

Essentials? Difficult to decide, it depends on why you are even selfhosting in the first place.

At a first glance and looking at my attempt at a homelab:

• some sort of basic web service (eg.: nginx + PHP setup)
• some sort of repo manager service (I do Fossil, but I hear most people use eg.: Gitea)
• XMPP server
• Jellyfin server
• Minetest server

Audiobookshelf, Calibre-Web, Plex/Jellyfin, FreshRSS, NextCloud, DokuWiki.

My most frequently used are most likely vaultwarden, Memos, Trilium, Jellyfin, Frigate, Traggo, and beaverhabits. Also AdGuard and NPM but I don’t interact with them.

Oh yeah and freshrss

And! Nextcloud and Baikal. NC only for storage and Baikal caldav and carddav

I have a dedicated vm for things that are crucial to the home network, either latency-critical or network related.

That'd be my dns resolver (I enforce it over VLANs by hijacking anyone trying to do DNS to other resolvers, like random IoT devices), homebridge for less important home automaton and my own matter controller for most important home automaton (controlling the lights).

My router of choice is RouterOS in another VM. I tried opnsense, pfsense, vyatta, and a bunch of others (even a containerized Cisco route), and I settled on ROS, because it was the only one who could do IPv6 properly (apart from Cisco, but that has other issues).

For the less important things I run them on k8s and really, there are only two bits worth mentioning as essential: ArgoCD and nixhelm. Together, they provide effortless and mostly automated software updates with very easy rollbacks. I don’t have to go and manually update every single bit of software and that saves huge amounts of time.

• thelounge
• git
• syncthing

Gamevault: To share Games with my friend's especially modded games. Jellyfin: Sharring Movies/Series/Music Immich: Saving my Pictures Pi-Hole + Unbound: Ad-blocking

For me, the most essentials are definitely:

• PhotoPrism
• Jellyfin
• Navidrome
• Wiki.js

Omada software controller handles my wireless access points. HomeBridge lets me control various things from my iPhone, without having to use 5 poorly-made apps.

Depends on the situation of course, but for us:

• immich: family photos are important
• docker + ssh: we enjoy hobbying with code, nerds be nerds
• samba: a file sharing protocol that works on all of our things

Plex, channels, mail, calendar, contacts, wiki

Adguard home

Immich (Photo backup), Vaultwarden (FOSS Biwarden server for passwords)