Open Source Software I use in my Homelab

A simple list of open source software I use at home, what I use them for and why. I’ll keep coming back to this page updating it every so often as my software usage is always changing!

Postfix, Dovecot, Roundcube

I use Microsoft 365 for my email needs as I don’t like to rely on myself to ensure email is working constantly and despite working with email for a long time, include Postfix, I don’t think I’m better than Microsoft. Plus, it’s not that expensive when you factor in all of the extras they include such as OneDrive and security enhancements.

However, I didn’t want to pay for a MS 365 Exchange backup as I couldn’t find anything that was cheap enough for one seat/license. So I installed Postfix, Dovecot and Roundcube on a VM at home. There’s a mail connector between my 365 tenants and the VM, and then I just set up Journaling in the Purview admin console. So every single email, inbound or outbound, internal or external is journaled to the relay at home and stored in one mailbox. I only have one mailbox in MS 365 so it’s not really an issue to shove them all together. Plus I view this as just a place I can go to if something goes wrong to look up historical emails. I likely wouldn’t replay them back into a recovered mailbox if the worst was to happen.

I also use it to send some emails from other software I use for notifications etc, as the connector goes back to MS 365 as well as in.

Immich

Immich is a photo backup application which I believe is meant to be a competitor for Google Photos. I haven’t really used Google Photos, but I did want a simple place to upload photos from my cameras too, as well as from my phone so I always have multiple copies of everything.

Immich is perfect for this. It has a web UI, and an IOS and android app. You can setup regular backups, so within moments of taking a photo on your phone it will upload it to your Immich deployment. I also have a Backblaze sync setup for the whole repository, so everything on Immich is backed up to an S3 bucket too (versioned).

Some features I really like:

• Face recognition, sorting and searching based on face profiles
• Timeline feature so photos are in order of when they were taken
• Easy setup and administration, especially when deployed using Docker
• IOS app is very well put together and is updated frequently
• Whole application is updated frequently with updates coming every week or so
• Completely free, there are no free trials or extra features locked behind paywalls

https://github.com/immich-app/immich

ARR: Sonarr, Radarr, qBittorrent

I like to download Linux ISOs.

I run Plex at home for all of my media (which isn’t open source, but I’ve tried Jellyfin and unfortunately the TV apps aren’t good enough, so I’m sticking with Plex for now), so I can watch everything from my phone/computer and TV. It helps me avoid paying for lots of different subscriptions like Netflix, Disney etc.

Sonarr and Radarr are part of a group of software called *ARR software, which are used to organise and retrieve media. Sonarr is used for TV programmes and Radarr is used for films.

I have them both setup to use a private tracker I have access to so they can search for and download media without me having to get too involved.

When I want to watch a film or TV series, all I have to do is login to the appropriate web application and search for the show. Once found, I click add, and the software goes away in the background, searches trackers for the relevant files and downloads them for me. Once downloaded, Plex picks them up automatically and they just show up for me to watch!

There are lots of other *ARR applications, but Sonarr and Radarr are the two main ones for me and they work really well. Especially when dockerised, they don’t take very long to setup and configure and once done it’s all pretty slick.

qBittorrent is used to do the actual downloading, and I’ve not found a different downloader that works quite as well and has the least amount of issues when it comes to setup and continued use.

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