hello,

im really tired of google music and spotify, and want to self host my downloaded music and create my library.

however, i know nothing about self hosting. My knowledge is absolutely zero. And Im completely lost about how to self host my own music. Dont find any good tutorial for dummies and i have a lot of question. I dont understand nothing. I see the tutorials of Navidrome and Ampache and still understand nothing. All of that looks extremely complicated to me.

How can i self host my music? I need to pay something? A very old and slow pc is enough?

Im completely lost. If someone can suggest something - like a tutorial , dunno - to build/self host my own music I appreciate a lot.

ty

  • @SaltarelloEnglish
    3•1 month ago

    A simple question with a mind boggling variety of solutions.

    I was in same boat as you, I knew absolutely nothing & was bamboozled by the volume of different answers, often none of which worked. But I kept battling away & am now self hosting various platforms. None of which are music but here goes 😁

    1. Choose your hardware. If you’ve not got spare hardware a Pi would work. I’d try to look at Pi4B or Pi5. Look at adding either external drive or SSD. If you go external drive route you’ll need to learn how to format, mount & auto mount the drive
    2. Choose a good notes app & make clear notes as you go. You’ll be referring to them again at some point!
    3. Its advantageous to be able to create a static IP address on your router. Consider picking up a cheap router preinstalled with OpenWRT (very powerful open source firmware). OpenWRT itself is complicated but the basics like port forwarding & static IP are straightforward
    4. Install Docker. This keeps keeps your programs in separate containers. Allows you to stop & remove containers without interfering with other containers
    5. Install Portainer. This was a light bulb moment for me - as soon as I realised you can build your own Docker containers and add your own Docker Compose files (add Compose files as a stack) from within Portainer. Allows you to easily control the containers from a web UI. This great tutorial is the most straightforward & outright useful tutorial I found on how to use Portainer (thank you Synthetic Everything if you ever read this): Install Nextcloud via Portainer & secure it with Nginx Proxy Manager
    6. From here its a question of building a Jellyfin Docker container or editing a suitable Compose file you find online into Portainer so that it suits your needs
    7. Decide whether you want to expose your setup to www if so look into Nginx proxy manager. Traffic to your domain such as Cloudflare or a free service is pointed to one port on your router which is exposed to www (WAN). Traffic to this port is handled by Nginx & forwarded to the relevant device IP address on your network (LAN). Nginx handles SSL certificates, is Open source & is brilliant. Free DDNS such as DuckDNS domain name can easily be set up in Portainer.
    8. If not, you’ll need to access your network externally. Tailscale is the current stock answer. Alternatively look into setting up Wireguard VPN. Once a device is granted access through a secure Wireguard connection you can access any device or its web UI on your network if you know its IP address (no need to remember them, this is what password managers are for, right?)

    Good luck