Everything on my Pi

I always wanted to have my self-hosted server when I was in college. Never had enough money to do much until recently. So after I got my first job, I have invested moderately (heavily ;)) in gadgets and stuff. And one of my most prized possession is my Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5. I have been using it for a while now, and I have installed many useful things on both of them. So I thought I would share it with everyone. This is a list of everything I have on my Pi.

Hardware and Specifications #

• Raspberry Pi 5 8GB Model
• Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB Model
• Raspberry Pi 15W USB-C Power Supply
• Raspberry Pi 27W USB-C Power Supply
• Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 500GB
• WD Blue SA510 SATA SSD M.2 2280
• Pimoroni NVMe Base for Raspberry Pi 5
• PiBOX NVMe SSD Enclosure

I already had a good quality ethernet cables and micro SD cards lying around. You may ask if I am using SSD then why use a SD Card. The simple answer is that I am using an SSD for storing everything, but all the OS functions are still run on the SD card. In an unlikely event, I can just pull out the SSD and plug it in a different machine to access my data.

Applications I am hosting #

I won’t be going into many details about my configurations in this post. I will probably cover them in separate posts. Here I will put a list of all the applications I am hosting and what I use them for.

I am using Tailscale to connect to my servers. They are locked down for access without Tailscale network. There is an open source alternative called Headscale as well, but I haven’t given much though of self-hosting them yet. For server management I am using RunTipi. It uses docker compose to manage all application install.

I will be listing the applications in the decreasing order of my priority.

Immich #

Immich is the best open source and feature rich replacement to Google Photos. For starters the installation is very easy, and you can install clients on Android and iOS. You can also use a CLI import tool to upload all your media easily. You get most of the Google Photos feature expect the editing tools. The project is in active development and the feature set is increasing day-by-day. You can see a comparision with other FOSS alternatives here.

Paisa #

It is really hard to keep track of all expenses from multiple accounts and credit cards. There are great solutions and applications but either they are too complex or paid. If you still decide to use them most of them don’t fit well with Indian users, simply because they were not planned with such users in mind. Nothing wrong there but mindset and habits of users matters a lot in such kind of applications. This application became my immediate favorite once I installed. There are many thing this application gets right. First of them is the ease to use UI and use of India specific terms and inspired from Indian spending habits. There is a bit of learning curve since this application builds on top of Plain Text Accouting, but it starts making sense once you learn it. The developer is an experienced Software engineer from India. This will work for most of the world but for Indian users this is a must-have if you are looking for such application. I wish it can have an android app as well. But the current web UI is more than enough.

Vikunja #

There are many great open source todo and kanban applications, I have tested many of them and settled for Vikunja. For personal use it was easy to set up. It has all the necessary features but is not bloated. The UI is good and it also supports CalDAV. An Android application is still in progress but you can utilize CardDAV with applications like DavX5 or Tasks.org. You can also create teams and have different projects.

Atuin #

I have 4 servers and many devices, it is not often easy to get the similar commands on different machines. That is where Atuin comes in. Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands. Additionally, it provides optional and fully encrypted synchronisation of your history between machines, via an Atuin server.

Gitea #

Gitea is a GitHub replacement written in Go. It includes a lot of features from GitHub including package registry, CI/CD, team collaboration etc. I have not been actively using it. But I plan to host my personal projects here.

Paperless-ngx #

This is a document management application where I can store my PDF/text documents (not ebooks). It has built in OCR and other useful feature to organise and search through your documents.

Shiori #

Shiori is a simple bookmarks manager written in the Go language. Intended as a simple clone of Pocket. You can use it as a command line application or as a web application. This application is distributed as a single binary, which means it can be installed and used easily. There is a third party Android app as well. You can get it here.

What is missing #

I am still searching apps for a general purpose file server and ebook management. A lot of people have suggested and I have also tried Nextcloud for file storage. I also believe it is the best open source alternative, but deep down it feels laggy and too much bloated for personal use. I would prefer something very minimal that solely works as a file server and explore and nothing else. Similarly, with ebooks, Calibre is good, but it feels outdated.

If you do have some great suggestions, please put them in comments down below. You can use GitHub sign in or put an anonymous comment.