5 self-hosted apps you need to be using that will improve your life

Self-hosted applications have exploded in popularity over the last couple of years – to the point where you’ll find containerized FOSS solutions for coders, bibliophiles, music enthusiasts, and almost every demographic under the sun. This also includes everyday apps designed to improve several aspects of your life, be it helping you stick to a schedule or designing your ideal meal plans. So, here’s a list of our favorite quality-of-life services you can host on local hardware.

For the calorie-counters out there

Managing your cookbook may seem like an easy task on the surface, but it’s a lot harder to organize your recipe list without a proper journaling tool. The complexity goes up a whole notch if you’re in charge of preparing meals, as you’ll also have to come up with proper diet plans.

TandoorRecipes is an all-in-one solution that can alleviate your meal-prepping woes. This tool lets you import the ingredient list, cooking procedure, and even the nutrition details using nothing more than a link to the recipe’s URL. Plus, it can automatically scale the ingredients per your needs with its built-in templates. As if that’s not enough, TandoorRecipes also lets you construct detailed meal plans to help you level up your cooking (and eating) game.

An interactive RPG to level up your daily habits

Habit-tracking apps can help you stay committed on your path of productivity and self-improvement. If you’re as big of a fan of RPG games as I am, Habitica will be a great addition to your home server.

Besides rewarding your hard work with the typical dopamine-inducing gold, XP, and armor, Habitica also ensures you stick to your productive habits by deducting your HP! Heck, Habitica has a class system, where your equipment and skills evolve in accordance with your level, and you can even set custom challenges to help you focus on new hobbies and tasks.

Not to be confused with Adobe’s AI generation tool

Keeping detailed records of your expenditures and savings goes a long way when you want to manage your hard-earned money effectively. Despite the quality-of-life benefits offered by accounting applications, privacy can be a major issue when you’re relying on third-party bookkeeping tools.

That’s when a self-hosted Firefly III server comes in handy, as it provides all the budgeting tools to help you micromanage all aspects of your personal finance without intruding on your privacy.

For the gym-bros (and gals) out there

Whether you’re a hardcore fitness freak looking to streamline your muscle gains or a casual gym-goer looking to calculate the number of calories burned with your intense training regimen, fitness apps are the perfect companion for your workout session, and wger serves as one of the best exercise-oriented services in the self-hosting landscape.

In addition to maintaining detailed records of your efforts, wger also lets you track your weight over time. Similar to TandoorRecipes, it can even help you plan out your meals, and you can even create a photo log showcasing your progress with this neat tool.

Or Vaultwarden, if you’re using a low-end workstation

In an age where keyloggers and hackers prowl the Internet, setting passwords for all your apps, services, and websites has a couple of complications. Using the same easy-to-guess password everywhere can free up some of your brainpower at the expense of making your accounts more vulnerable to security issues.

Meanwhile, creating Eldritch chant-like passwords can make it harder for hackers to gain the upper hand, though you’ll have to maintain a log of all your passkeys to avoid forgetting them at inopportune moments. Bitwarden is the perfect tool in this scenario, as it can back up your login credentials, and you can even use it to create randomly generated passkeys to add an extra layer of protection to your accounts.

Apart from these five tools, there are a couple of useful apps worth highlighting. If you’re tired of premium note-taking tools, you’ll feel right at home using TriliumNotes Next as your personal knowledge management system. There’s also Paperless-ngx, which can make document management a piece of cake with its amazing OCR and tagging utilities. For productivity-driven users, NocoDB is a solid alternative to Airtable and other expensive project management tools. Finally, you’ve got Home Assistant, a powerful OS (or container, if you’re willing to deal with some minor issues) that can act as a control hub for all your smart home devices and IoT products.