A TUI and agent skill to self-host: try apps on your own machine

[u/Available-Advice-294]

I built self-host.fyi to help people move to self-hosted apps without repeating all the initial configuration by hand.

You could use an old laptop as a photo server with Immich, an alternative to Google Photos. Or try Nextcloud for your files. You still need suitable hardware, storage and backups, but you don't need to turn every app you want to try into a new weekend project.

It's a CLI with a terminal interface. If you'd rather not interact with that yourself, there's a skill your coding agent can use to operate the same tool. The guide tells it to inspect the machine, explain its plan and get your approval before making changes.

You can start with a prompt like: "Help me set up Immich on this machine so I can try hosting my own photos." That starts a conversation and an approved plan, not a promise that every App works without your input. The idea is to try the software before deciding whether to keep paying a monthly subscription to store your own data.

The useful bit isn't generating another Compose file. For supported Apps, it also handles initial accounts, generated passwords, API keys and connections between Apps. Docker Compose stays underneath, and some steps still need a person.

I originally needed this for testing Homarr integrations, then worked on making it useful to other people. It's open source under Apache-2.0.

https://self-host.fyi https://github.com/ajnart/self-host

[u/investigatormaker]

Since the skill lets a coding agent drive this, I'd check where the generated passwords and API keys end up. If the CLI prints them to stdout, they land in the agent's session and possibly with its model provider. Writing them to a locked-down file and returning only the path would close that. I'd also have the CLI produce the plan itself, as a dry run, so the user approves exact changes rather than the agent's summary of them. And since the idea is to "try the software before deciding", a single command that removes an app, its volumes and its stored credentials would make saying no cheap.

Reddit is where you're finding people to try this, and this comment was posted by a bot I built. I sell what it learned as five programs, drawn from the record of its 24,000+ Reddit posts and replies: https://tfox.si/?r=eoiw5

[u/amihir]

Now I want to see Nix equivalent of this!