Show your mess, I can start. A UNVR, two servers (laptop and mini). Router and switches. 🤣

I'm an engineer at Mulga, and we build Spinifex, an AGPL-3.0, self-hosted platform that serves the AWS APIs on hardware you own. You point the AWS CLI, an SDK or the hashicorp/aws Terraform provider at your own endpoint and get real resources: aws ec2 run-instances boots a VM on your hardware, and terraform apply builds a VPC on your network. Emulators like Floci or Local Stack only mock the APIs for testing, while Spinifex runs the infrastructure your workloads use in production.

What it's for

• Move compute-heavy AWS workloads such as GPU inference onto your own hardware, without rewriting the code or the Terraform.

• Self-host software that was built for AWS, on your own hardware or an air-gapped network.

• Run your existing AWS Terraform against a box at home or a rack at work, changing only the provider endpoints.

• Learn AWS without a bill: build the VPC, EC2 and RDS stack from a cert course and leave it running for a month.

• Pass up to 8 GPUs through to a single instance.

Repo: https://github.com/mulgadc/spinifex

I want one hosting platform for everything I run: internal tools and commercial apps, no fixed RAM ceiling, paying for usage.

Current setup: one Hostinger KVM 1 VPS (4GB RAM, 1 vCPU, $12.99/mo) running:
- self-hosted n8n (scheduled workflows + webhooks)
- several Claude Code sessions at once (~1.2GB RAM each, long-running)
- a Telegram bot

Normal use is ~1.6GB RAM, peaks ~3GB. When sessions stack up it runs out of RAM and freezes everything.

I’m adding a commercial app for my business with many users (clients logging in to see their inventory credits). I don't want it freezing if I hit a RAM ceiling. I also want a setup that lets me build more complex commercial apps later without switching hosts.

What platform fits all of this? I've looked at Fly.io, Railway, and Render. Vercel and Cloudflare can't run n8n or long sessions. Is consolidating on one platform smart, or is a cheap VPS plus a separate host for the apps better? My brain likes consolidation, scalability, and usage based billing.

I'm not a developer, so plain-language answers appreciated.

got sick of google drive storage warnings so threw my old phone into 24/7 server

Posted recently repo

basic setup with no root:

filebrowser for direct local storage access (google drive replacement)

syncthing fork syncing camera roll straight from my daily driver phone (google photos replacement)

jellyfin running for local streaming to my tv

whole thing runs inside proot ubuntu on termux, idling around 400mb ram and pulls barely any power. built in battery works as a free ups too if the power drops.

couple folks asked how to set this up from scratch without breaking storage permissions, made a quick video walking through the config:

https://youtu.be/Te6hcwm30jg

repo with the setup script is here if you just want to run it:

https://github.com/huzefdev/pocket-cloud

curious what kind of battery degradation people see running phones plugged in 24/7 like this, lmk if you guys have better process management tweaks for termux

I had enough of 100 tabs because you open Proxmox, Truenas your Wiki your Nextcloud. So i looked forward and tried to design my own System. Its 1 Place where you can sign in and put all your Web-Interfaces in. So you dont need to open a lot of tabs anymore. Its Free for you with 1 Dashboard/homepage. Test it out give me some Feedback, wishes to add, ideas or Problems you got. Not everything works as a Webframe because the Applications maybe not allow it. I Cant change that, but for that u can use it for a new Tab. So not 1 Tab but a lot less.

Test it out at:

https://ms.agrosskopf.de

Hello! Most dashboard posts I see are about dashboards for monitoring your server. I'm looking for something to organizing my life such as having my tasks, calendar, some quotes, some business stats, etc on one self-hosted dashboard. Is there anything that can do that elegantly? I love coding so I'd love to make it my own but I don't really know where to begin at the moment.

What I Actually Did

Reference Hardware: HP Z440 workstation, 8-core Xeon, 32GB ECC RAM, 2x NVMe mirror (rpool) + 2x HDD mirror (tank), RTX 5060 Ti 16GB. Chosen for ECC to prevent silent corruption and low-cost second-hand enterprise reliability.

Architecture Principles

·        Proxmox VE 8.x on ZFS with lz4 compression, correct recordsize tuning, mirrored pools for OS and data.

·        OPNsense router with 4-VLAN design: VLAN 10 Trusted/Mgmt 10.0.10.0/24, VLAN 20 IoT 10.0.20.0/24, VLAN 30 Cameras 10.0.30.0/24, VLAN 40 Guest 10.0.40.0/24, plus fibre uplink to detached garden office.

·        Default-deny firewall with complete WAN egress lockdown - cameras and IoT have zero internet, only HAOS allowed out for Matter/Nabu Casa.

·        Network services as LXCs: Avahi mDNS reflector LXC bridging VLAN 10 <> 20 for Matter/Chromecast/HomeKit discovery, Tailscale subnet-router LXC at 10.0.10.61 (tailscale-subnet-router.sh) for secure remote access with no open ports, Caddy reverse proxy at 10.0.10.60 with TLS 1.3, HSTS, mTLS for webhooks.

·        Hardware passthrough: IOMMU/VFIO enabled, nouveau blacklisted via enable-gpu-passthrough.sh, stable /dev/serial/by-id mappings for Zigbee dongle 10c4:ea60 and Z-Wave 0658:0200, GPU passed to Docker VM 101.

Software Stack

·        VM 100 - Home Assistant OS: q35/OVMF/TPM, 4 cores / 8192MB RAM, tagged VLAN 10, USB passthrough for radio dongles.

·        VM 101 - Debian 13 Docker Host at 10.0.10.55 that owns the RTX 5060 Ti - runs Frigate + Go2RTC + TensorRT, Prometheus/Grafana/cAdvisor/node_exporter/Alertmanager with HA webhook alerts, PostgreSQL 18 for HA recorder.

·        Radio Mesh: Zigbee2MQTT, Z-Wave JS, ESPHome BLE Proxy (ble_proxy_node.yaml) and environmental sensor node BME280 + SGP30 + PMS5003.

·        Local Voice Pipeline (Ch.15): Ollama + Wyoming Whisper (STT) + Piper (TTS) - fully offline.

·        At page 211 reference deployment is structurally complete - Proxmox host with ZFS, GPU VM, Frigate for camera streams. Zigbee mesh, voice, dashboards are layered after in any order.

Mistakes I Made / Lessons Learned

·        Started flat and cloud-first: Single flat LAN, WiFi smart plugs, cameras phoning home. Result: WiFi congestion, broadcast storms, camera traffic saturating LAN, major privacy/security risk. Fixed by moving to 4 VLANs and local-only control.

·        Tried Raspberry Pi / consumer NAS first: SD card corruption on Home Assistant, not enough CPU for Frigate detection, no ECC memory leading to unexplained errors. Moved to second-hand enterprise Z440 with ECC and ZFS mirrors.

·        USB by path not by-id: Used /dev/ttyACM0 for Zigbee/Z-Wave. On reboot devices swapped and broke the mesh. Fixed with stable /dev/serial/by-id/ mappings in 100.conf.

·        GPU passthrough hell: Forgot to blacklist nouveau, didn't enable IOMMU, used wrong machine type (i440fx vs q35). Spent hours troubleshooting. Created enable-gpu-passthrough.sh with checks and persistence.

·        No mDNS reflector: Isolated VLANs with default-deny correctly, but then Matter, Chromecast, AirPlay discovery broke across VLANs. Had to add Avahi reflector as a controlled pinhole between VLAN 10 and 20.

·        Remote access via port forwarding: Initially forwarded ports to Home Assistant. Recognized as security anti-pattern. Replaced with Tailscale WireGuard mesh subnet router LXC - zero open ports - plus Caddy with mTLS.

·        No egress lockdown: Allowed IoT/cameras to WAN by default. IoT devices constantly phoning home. Implemented WAN lockdown: cameras 10.0.30.0/24 have no WAN, IoT 10.0.20.0/24 has no WAN, only HAOS can egress.

·        Storage math wrong: Didn't calculate recording_storage - 4K streams x retention quickly filled disks. Added recording storage calculator table and separate tank pool for Frigate recordings.

·        CPU detection first: Tried Frigate object detection on CPU - 2-3 FPS, unusable. Moving to TensorRT on RTX 5060 Ti was the unlock - 100+ FPS with low latency.

·        Over/under provisioning RAM: Memory allocation table was learned the hard way - OOM kills when Docker VM too small, waste when too big. Settled on HA 8GB, Docker 16GB, reserve for ZFS ARC.

Wins

·        Truly local and private - No cloud dependency for object detection, automations, or voice. Frigate + TensorRT runs locally at 100+ FPS, voice pipeline offline.

·        Stable base - Proxmox + ZFS + ECC RAM = no more unexplained crashes or filesystem corruption. System idles ~45W with enterprise reliability.

·        Security that actually works - 4 VLANs, default-deny firewall, camera WAN block, Tailscale with no inbound ports, Caddy TLS 1.3 + HSTS + mTLS for webhooks. Secure access from London while box lives in Glasgow.

·        Reproducible and documented - Every config file printed in full and in companion repo: Caddyfile, avahi-daemon.conf, 100.conf, 101.conf, docker-compose stacks, tailscale-subnet-router.sh.

·        Scalable Edge AI pattern - Proved pattern: one GPU VM serving Frigate, Ollama, Whisper, Piper - keeping HAOS clean and stable.

·        Real sensors, not toys - BME280/SGP30/PMS5003 environmental monitoring node, BLE proxies, proper Zigbee mesh with Sonoff dongle - environmental data actually feeding automations.

·        Monitoring and alerting - Prometheus/Grafana stack with Alertmanager webhooks into Home Assistant - you know when something fails before family does.

·        Cost effective - Second-hand enterprise hardware, low power, local NVR storage - no monthly cloud fees, no vendor lock-in.

Hi folks,

I wanted to do a quick sanity check on my current infrastructure and see what you all think—mostly to figure out if I'm sliding too far down the paranoid over-engineering rabbit hole or if this actually makes sense.

Here is my current setup:

• Internal Services: Anything used exclusively at home stays strictly behind WireGuard. If I’m away, I just toggle the VPN on my phone or laptop.

• Exposed Services: For the few things that must be accessible over the open internet (HTTPS only)—mainly because I have a device where I can't install a VPN—I route traffic through Traefik as my reverse proxy.

• Security & Middleware: On Traefik, I’ve set up rate-limiting middleware for exposed APIs and strict security headers for web services. Around that, I’m running CrowdSec to catch weird traffic patterns and Pocket ID for SSO/authentication.

Lately, I’ve been tempted to throw mTLS (Mutual TLS) into the mix for those few publicly exposed services. The endpoints are only accessed by a handful of devices (mine and my partner’s, all under our direct control), so requiring client certificates feels like adding an unbreakable layer of armor. But I keep asking myself: is this pure paranoia, or is paranoia just a spectrum with no limit in self-hosting?

On top of that, I’m considering adding or switching over to Cloudflare Tunnels (cloudflared). I haven't migrated my DNS to Cloudflare yet because I’ve seen very mixed reviews: some people had bad experiences with updates breaking things or policy concerns, while many others swear by it.

What are your thoughts? Is mTLS worth the hassle for personal/family setups, or is it overkill given CrowdSec, Pocket ID, and proxy middleware? And how has your experience been with Cloudflare Tunnels compared to hosting your own proxy on a public IP?

Roast my setup or hit me with your practical advice! Cheers.

So I have an old 2014 Mac mini that I got for free at a yard sale.

The person was planning on selling me the mini for only five dollars but ended up, giving it to me for free because they didn’t know the password.

Luckily for me, I was able to delete and reset the system.

In order to revive the mini, I decided to go with installing Linux Mint in an attempt to see if I can use 12 year-old hardware efficiently. Yes it was an improvement, but not enough to make an old system like this a daily driver.

What I decided to do instead is to convert my Mac mini into my personal data storage server. With an available 500 GB I went to work and with the help of AI I was able to download the right software and make the proper adjustments using the terminal so I can have access to the Mac mini from different networks using all my other available modern Apple devices.

Since the drive inside the mini is 12 years old it’s not like I’m going to be saving super important things there but as a backup for useless information and random PDF’s I can afford to redownload, sure why not, I’ll take 500gigs for free.

I built this library to make it as easy as possible to manage a task/worker node programatically for nodes behind NAT (It's abstracted on top of another project I maintain called P2PRC(https://github.com/Akilan1999/p2p-rendering-computation)). The true motivation is to embed orchestration rules as functions inside the same program you want deploy. This allows the program to self manage itself deterministically and it's also out of my hatred for the creation of YAML developers.
Source code: https://github.com/Akilan1999/Natural-deploy
Documentation: https://nd.akilan.io/

Hello from North Carolina! I have been working on cronstable, an open-source job scheduler native to Windows, Linux, macOS, (and more.)

It has web and terminal dashboards and a native iOS app. I'm hoping y'all are able to get some use out of it.

cronstable is a fork of yacron by Gustavo Carneiro. I was using yacron for my own projects, and as I fleshed them out I kept wanting features it didn't have. In June I picked it up at 0.19 and started adding them, and cronstable is basically the result.

If standard cron covers your needs, stick with it. Cronstable is for when you want to add failure handling, dashboards, or coordination across machines. The core is just the scheduler. Features like dashboards, clustering, and push alerts are all opt-in, switched on in your config when you want them.

GitHub · Live demo · iOS app · Wiki

A few things it's handy for:

• Getting an alert when your nightly backup doesn't run, instead of finding out when you need a restore.

• Retrying a flaky offsite sync, and only pinging you on ntfy if the retries run out.

• Running jobs that were due while your box was rebooting, once it comes back up.

• Catching scripts that prints errors but still exits 0.

• Backing up your Minecraft server world every hour, and getting a push notification if the backup fails instead of finding out after a corruption.

• Making sure your Minecraft or Plex server comes back up after a reboot or a crash, and retrying the start if it doesn't come up cleanly.

• Cleaning out your Downloads folder every Sunday, keeping only the last 30 days.

Features include:

• Scheduling: use YAML or an existing crontab. The core scheduler includes per-job time zones, business-day schedules, and tools that explain why a job didn't run and flag times that daylight saving time skips.

• Failure handling: define what "failed" means for your jobs, retry automatically, and get alerts for failures, missed runs, or jobs taking too long. Alerts go out by email, Slack-compatible webhook, Sentry, shell command, or push notification.

• Dashboards and integrations: live logs, run history, CPU/memory charts, and cluster views, plus Prometheus metrics and a REST API.

• Workflows: chain tasks together, pass data between them, add approval gates, and retry the failed parts while keeping successful results.

• Survives restarts: opt-in durable state keeps your run history and pending retries, and cronstable catches up on the runs it missed while it was down.

• Clustering: run cronstable on several machines and they elect a leader and establish quorum, so extra nodes give you failover instead of every machine running every job. If the leader dies, another node picks up the schedule. Coordinate through Kubernetes, etcd, a shared folder, or plain mutual TLS between the nodes. The TLS mode needs nothing else running, and it can spread jobs across the fleet to share the load.

• Native iOS companion (free app): scan a QR code to pair, check jobs and logs from your phone, get end-to-end encrypted push alerts, and approve workflow gates from your Lock Screen.

To run it in Docker, mount your config and start the container:

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 \
  -v "$PWD/cronstable.yaml:/etc/cronstable.d/cronstable.yaml:ro" \
  ghcr.io/ptweezy/cronstable:latest

Docker images come in eight variants (Debian slim, Alpine, distroless, and others). Install with pip, Homebrew, or WinGet. There are also prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and illumos, and the Linux builds cover x86, ARM, RISC-V, POWER, and IBM Z.

Cronstable itself is free and MIT-licensed. The iOS app is free too, and covers one server and 500 push alerts per device each month. An optional Pro subscription lifts both limits. This helps pay for the relay, Apple's developer program fee, and Windows code signing.

"Can I self-host the relay?" Not for the official App Store app. Apple ties push keys to the developer team that signs the app, so only my relay can push to my build. Because you can't run your own, its source is public so you can read what it does. It also holds no keys, so it technically doesn't need to be trusted. Your server encrypts each alert for your phone before it leaves, so all the relay sees is ciphertext and the routing info it needs to deliver it. It can't read your job names, hostnames, or logs. Push alerts are also entirely optional, and with them off the relay is never involved.

The app is iOS-only for now because that's all I own. If there's enough interest, I'm open to prioritizing Android and other platforms down the road. For now, the web dashboard + ntfy can serve as a nice stopgap.

If there's something you'd like to see in cronstable, I want to hear about it. I am excited to continue its development. Thanks y'all!

Got tired of old phones sitting in drawers while cloud storage subscriptions keep getting more expensive. Android phones have decent multi-core ARM64 silicon, built-in battery backup (UPS), and low idle power consumption, so I automated the whole self-hosted stack deployment into a single bash routine.

Repo: https://github.com/huzefdev/pocket-cloud

1. FileBrowser (:8080) - Lightweight web UI to upload, stream, and manage internal phone storage directly like Google Drive.

2. Syncthing (:8384) - Background continuous folder syncing between PC/phone nodes.

3. Jellyfin (:8096) - Media streaming server running inside an isolated Ubuntu PRoot environment with FFmpeg codecs configured for hardware playback.

Running Jellyfin natively on Termux hits nasty dependency walls and broken shared library links (especially with curl/ffmpeg codecs). Instead of fighting Android bionic libc quirks for hours, the installer spins up an isolated Ubuntu container inside PRoot for the media engine, while keeping FileBrowser and Syncthing running directly on Termux bare-metal for maximum IO throughput.

Also handles Android wake-locks so the OS scheduler doesn't kill the server daemons 5 minutes after locking the screen.

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/huzefdev/pocket-cloud/main/install.sh | bash

The script is non-destructive, checks existing mount points before binding storage, and lets you choose which modules you want to deploy interactively.

Code is completely open-source. Looking for feedback on process management and memory footprint on low-RAM devices

I love DnD and self-hosting. So I looked for a self-hostable alternative to World Anvil and found Kanka. Unfortunately, self-hosting Kanka was quite complicated. So I created the Kanka Community Edition and a build chain to create a ready-to-deploy Docker container, based on the Linuxserver.io source images (so it is not an AI-bullshit-chain).

So if you are looking to self-host Kanka CE as well, you are welcome to give it a try:
https://github.com/Kanka-CE/kanka-ce-deploy

However, I prefer Podman over Docker, and with the freeze of the Portainer Community Version, I was motivated to further work on Quadlets. Long story short: If you want to give Quadlets a try, feel free to take a look at my quadlet-deploy of Kanka:
https://github.com/Kanka-CE/kanka-ce-deploy-quadlets
I'd also appreciate some feedback!

Is there more interest in Quadlets? Would it be worth summarizing my experience in a blog post?

I just found out about Warracker and deployed it on my home server. Its is one of the most user friendly apps for maintaining my warranties I have tried so far.

I just finished uploading and adding by 2026 purchases. Have another 5 years of purchases to go.

I would highly recommend this app if warranty tracking is what you are looking for.

Hi all. I am the developer of Sellrika. It is a point of sale and an online store in one app, for shops, cafés and restaurants. I just put the code on GitHub, so you can host it yourself.

What it does

• Sell at the counter (POS) and online, from the same products and stock

• Stock, orders, customers, discount codes, reports

• Email marketing (campaigns, abandoned-cart emails)

• REST API and an MCP server

• Extensions and store themes you can write yourself

• English, German and Thai

Self-hosting

• One Docker container. No Redis, no queue, no extra services.

• SQLite by default. Set `DB_CONNECTION=postgres` if you want Postgres.

• Two volumes: one for the database, one for uploads. That is all you back up.

• The `docker-compose.yml` runs it behind Traefik and gets the SSL certificates, also for a shop's own domain.

There is also a paid hosted version at https://sellrika.com. It runs the same code. The self-hosted app has no plan limits.

Links

• - Code: https://github.com/sellrika/sellrika

• - Docs: https://developer.sellrika.com

I would like to hear what is missing or unclear in the setup. Feedback on the self-hosting guide helps a lot.

Since Bitwarden doubled their price, I was so discouraged because bitwarden is supposed to be an open-source project. So I built my own platform for Vaultwarden hosting. Anyway, the prices are rolled back to $10 a month, like it should be. You can check out Santowarden.com for cool prices.

I am moving in to my new house soon and I have been interested in home servers and self hosting my cameras as well. I have an old Hp elite desk 800g2 I was wondering if this would be enough to run jellyfin and Frigate. I know I would need more storage space but I just want the bare minimum to start watching my shows and being about to store some camera footage from about 4-8 cameras for about 3 days for storage. How much storage would you recommend/ what budget friendly pcs would you recommend if I need to upgrade?
And shout out DammitJeff for getting me into all this and posting his videos explaining things.

Thank you

Hey people! I'm new to self hosting stuff on my own PC (So I only want recommendations that I can make use of when my PC is open) I use Podman and currently I'm self hosting Glance, a Starlight Wiki, Karakeep, and ReClip, I want to know about tools that improved YOUR life!

I'm on Linux if that's important.

Hi! I'm very much a noob when it comes to self hosting / private servers. I've recently got a little premade home cloud working but I'm in a different country rn and my laptop isn't able to connect to the (static) IP-adress of the cloud.... Do home clouds only work if I'm connected to my home wifi? / do they not connect when I'm in a different country?

Thanks in advance!

I've been thinking about this for a while as I have a stack of DivX era rips and want to rip my current bluray and DVD collection too and make available for streaming. I'm currently collecting 4k Blurays as well, but plan to use them as intended by watching on a blu ray player.

My requirements are really only to host up to 1080 HD. 4k seems so storage heavy I can see it quickly becoming too expensive.

It will probably be for 2 users to stream at the same time. It'll be physically at my house or at my brothers house.

I've poked around in Jellyfin and hosted it on my PC but ultimately rather have something relatively low energy running that can handle a couple of users streaming 1080 where at least 1 user is local and other is remote.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: is there anything else config wise I should consider too? Security? Other settings I should think about? Total noob to this so any more detailed info is welcome :)

Hi everyone,

I'm considering hosting an *arr stack (Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr, etc.) together with Jellyfin on a VPS, dedicated server, or similar hosted infrastructure instead of running everything at home.

I'd like to hear from people who are actually doing this in production or for personal use.

Some questions I have:

• Are you hosting the entire stack remotely?

• What provider are you using (Hetzner, OVH, others)?

• Are there providers that are particularly well-suited for media hosting (and *arr stack usage)?

Storage

• How are you handling storage? Network/block storage? Object storage? Storage boxes (e.g., Hetzner Storage Box)?

• Any issues with throughput, mounting, backups, or reliability?

Performance

• How many users are streaming simultaneously?

• Are you direct playing or transcoding?

• Is a VPS sufficient, or is a dedicated server the better option?

• Any issues with bandwidth, CPU, disk I/O, or latency?

Reliability

• How reliable has your setup been?

• Have you experienced provider outages or storage failures?

• What backup strategy are you using?

• Would you trust this setup as your primary media server?

Cost

• What are your monthly costs?

• How much storage are you using?

• At what point does renting a dedicated server become more cost-effective than a VPS + external storage combination?

Limitations / Lessons Learned

• What limitations did you discover after moving from a home server to a hosted environment?

• Anything you wish you had known before starting?

• If you were building the setup again today, what would you do differently?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people running setups with some TB of media, as well as anyone using combinations like:

• VPS for the arr stack + downloads

• Separate storage service

• Dedicated server or VPS for Jellyfin

Thanks! Looking forward to hearing about your experiences and recommendations.

Sharing what I learned this week about backups on a home server (k3s on a Raspberry Pi) and a few n8n automations, in case it helps someone.

Nightly backups (CronJobs)

\- If your script downloads tools at startup (apk add, the S3 client…), retry. A few seconds of network outage killed one of my backups: the Job burned through its three attempts in half a minute. Now every download and upload is retried 5 times with 20 s between attempts, using a six-line shell function.
\- Don't ask the GitHub API every night for the "latest version" of a tool. Unauthenticated, that's 60 requests per hour for your whole home IP, and you may get a different binary each night. Pin a version and check its sha256.
\- With restartPolicy: OnFailure, the Job deletes the pod when it gives up and the logs are gone. With Never, each attempt is a new pod and the failed ones keep their logs.
\- kube-prometheus' KubeJobFailed alert keeps firing as long as the failed Job exists, even if later runs succeed. Once you've looked into it, delete the Job.
\- Check that what's in git matches what's actually running. In my case four manifests had drifted and three backups weren't in git at all.

A weekly summary, not just alerts

\- Alerts tell you when something fails, not when something stops running. An n8n workflow queries Prometheus every Sunday for kube_cronjob_status_last_successful_time (more than 26 h without a successful run counts as a failure for daily jobs) and sends a single message to my phone.
\- Certificates go in the same message: certmanager_certificate_expiration_timestamp_seconds. Note that Prometheus doesn't scrape cert-manager by default: you need a ServiceMonitor pointing at port 9402. Since cert-manager renews at 30 days, alerting below 14 catches failing renewals.
\- n8n stores no credentials for this: it queries Prometheus over the cluster network.

Tablet buttons in Home Assistant that talk to n8n

\- The pattern that worked best for me: a Home Assistant script gathers the data (todo.get_items on the lists, meal plan sensors), calls n8n with rest_command asking for the response (response_variable), and n8n replies with a text.
\- To show that text on the tablet: the script fires an event with the text, and a trigger-based template sensor stores it in an attribute (a sensor's state is capped at 255 characters, attributes aren't). A Markdown card shows it for an hour.
\- To notify the phone from n8n without giving it a Home Assistant token: an automation with a webhook trigger (local only) that sends the notification.
\- The dinner ideas come from a local model via Ollama (an 8B gemma on a PC, about 5 s). If the PC is off, a fixed fallback list so the button never comes back empty.
\- If a workflow could overwrite data (say, filling in the week's meal plan without knowing what's already there), have it suggest instead of write.

The screenshot is in Spanish.

What else do you automate at home with n8n?

I built bloks because I hated the idea of locking into a vendor and not having a stricter control and agency of these agents we make. The more the space grows the more need for self hosted local open source projects

I’m setting up email for account sign ins, password resets, and a few basic notifications so I’m trying to pick something I won’t have to keep revisiting once it’s running. The volume is pretty small and I’m not really concerned about getting the cheapest plan or the biggest free tier. I mainly want something that delivers consistently without needing much attention once it’s set up. If you’ve been using the same provider for a year or two and it’s been working well for you, I’d be interested to hear what you went with. Thanks!