Apologies for the poor grammar, English IS my first language and so I’m rather flagrant with runons.
I’m really not half as tech literate as half the people on the fediverse, but my noia about the state of online cloud hosting and lack of control over my data has led me far out of my depth. I’m wanting to set up a LibreCMC router and connect it to some type of home server (made of local office E-Waste) for media storage, email hosting, and fucking Minecraft servers or something. I promise I’ve tried my best in searching for the problem but often find myself floundering in 3-letter acronyms, and relations between systems I don’t understand (like dockers, or the Jellyfin vs Plex argument.) I don’t need an explanation but maybe some orientation on where I am to look for resources on these topics that assume I’m the 6 celled neurobase I am.
Thank you for your help, or your chastising.
Edit: thank you everyone for your replies! I’ll hopefully keep you all updated as I work through learning Linux terminals, and destroying terabytes of data in horribly predictable mistakes : )


If you go for openwrt instead of librecmc the amount of guides and docs will skyrocket.
Compatible hardware for openwrt is found here:
https://toh.openwrt.org/?view=normal
A tip is to sort on the 5.0GHz table so all the devices that support ac and ax (newer wifi standards) are shown first.
They have a lot of good guides here:
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-quick-start/start
Regarding home server you would want to decide on the host operating system first. Examples are proxmox (hypervisor, controlled mainly through a web ui), a standard linux server with kvm/qemu and docker, openmediavault (NAS operating system) or Windows 11 with HyperV (please don’t).
First thing after that is to figure out of to make and restore backups of the system. Knowing that you can restore everything to how it was last night makes tinkering a lot less frustrating. Proxmox has builtin backup systems, with linux I like BORG Backup.
Regarding services you will want to read up on dockers and find a docker management system you like. I run portainer, others swear by dockge and yet some prefer the command line.
Regarding video streaming; If you don’t a lifetime license for Plex I would go for Jellyfin. Plex free is continuing to lose, not gain, functions as of now.
Immich is popular for photo storage.
Regarding game servers I think https://pterodactyl.io/ is popular to make it simpler but you can probably find a plain docker image to host minecraft. If you wanna mod mc I know Pterodactyl makes it simpler to add mods on the server.
I had never heard of dockge before, but this sounds like the killer feature for me:
Does that mean I can just point it at my existing docker compose files?
My current layout is a folder for each service/stack , which contains docker-compose.yaml + data-folders etc for the service. docker-compose and related config files are versioned in git.
I have portainer, but rarely use it , and won’t let it manage the configuration, because that interfered with versioning the config in git.
I tried out Komodo, but gave up on it. I looked at dockge after, but opted not to try it out. I prefer the IaaC setup with my compose in a repo for versioning and rollback. And while I think you can probably combine the two, komodo was getting in the way most of the time. It centered around secrets management and generating those secrets at run time.
That said, I feel like if I expand beyond a single server I may go back to one of these tools
You add the compose via the DockGE UI, it then creates the necessary files and folders in
/opt/stacks/. Not sure whether it works the other way around: to create the folder, copy the compose file in there, and see if it is recognized.I’ve been using it for over a year, works very smooth.
Do you version your compose files in git? If so, how does that work with the dockGE workflow?
No, I don’t, I only back up
/opt/stacksto borgbase. I imagine it should be possible, but it might depend on how the projects are arranged in git. Monorepo might give trouble, but separate repo’s might work.