The Best New Self-Hosted Apps for Your Homelab [May 2026]

Añadido: 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]We've got a fresh new batch of self-hosted apps to go through today, and this round has a little bit of everything. Cloudflare tunnel automation, a slick VPN container, Docker volume backups with an actual UI, two different takes on infrastructure inventory, file sharing, and a couple of handy utilities you can spin up in seconds. All of these suggestions come from the self-host newsletters produced by Ethan Schalli, and I will cover some of the best apps we've seen from the newsletter. I'm your host Evan. Let's look at the best new apps of May.

[00:00:32]First up is Docflare. Now, full disclosure, Docflare isn't actually a new container. It's been around for a while, but now it has some new functionality I want to highlight for you all. In case you've never heard of Docflare, it's a self-hosted control plane for Cloudflare tunnels that turns your Docker labels into fully configurable tunnel ingress, DNS records, and Cloudflare access policies automatically. The whole idea is to stop you from clicking around in the Cloudflare dashboard every time you spin up a new service. Inside the web UI, you've got one place that shows every route Docflare is managing. The magic is in the labels. If you drop a few docflare.enable, docflare.hostnames, and docflare.service labels into a container, very similar to the way Traefik works, Docflare picks those up in the container, and then creates a DNS record, wires up the tunnel ingress rule, and can even attach a Cloudflare access group to lock it down, all without me going anywhere near the Cloudflare dashboard. For anything that isn't a container, there's a manual rule mode right in the UI, so you're not locked into labels only. The new functionality I want to highlight is email. Cloudflare recently released a pseudo email service, which I covered in another video, link in the video description below. And the creator of Docflare folded this new functionality into his container, so you can use Docflare both for its automatic tunnel management, as well as Cloudflare's new, quote-unquote, email system. Go check out the video right now, and tell me what you think of this latest product from Cloudflare.

[00:02:02]Next up is PIA ton. PIA ton is a Docker image for running Private Internet Access over WireGuard with a strict kill switch, port forwarding, and built-in proxies. It's basically a purpose-built VPN gateway container for your download stack. Now, there's no big UI to show here. This is one of those set it and forget it kind of containers, but the feature set is where it earns its spot.

[00:02:24]It's got a zero leak kill switch that engages in around 25 milliseconds, WireGuard throughput tested at over 95% of line speed, and automatic PIA port forwarding that'll sync straight into Qbit for you. It exposes socks5 and HTTP proxies, so other containers and machines can ride the tunnel, and it ships health, ready, and Prometheus metrics endpoints if you want to monitor it. There is no manual off token juggling, either. It grabs the PIA token, and it keeps it fresh on its own.

[00:02:53]If you use Gluten, this is the same thing, but where Gluten is the Swiss Army knife that supports basically every provider, PIA ton is laser-focused on doing PIA plus WireGuard really, really well. For PIA subscriber who just wants their R stack tunneled with a rock-solid port forwarding, this focused approach is really appealing. Go ahead and navigate over to the wiki. I've got a link in the video description below, and see how to deploy PIA ton. The Docker Compose file is pretty straightforward, and I even include Qbit here to show how it would stack together to make Qbit route all its traffic through PIA ton.

[00:03:29]Next up is Volume Bolt. Volume Bolt is a self-hosted web app for managing Docker volume and host path backups with safe restores. And under the hood, it's driving the well-known, often Docker volume backup engine. This is one thing I think a lot of you have been waiting for. The dashboard gives you a clear view of your backup jobs, your coverage across stacks, and your run history. You just point this at your Docker volumes or specific host paths, and then set a schedule, choose an encrypted destination, and it handles the rest. I can easily create a backup job by just clicking the button, giving it a name, selecting my Docker volume, which it found automatically, leaving everything else basically the same, and then creating the job. From here, I can run my job, restore my job, or delete the job, or change it. If you've ever used the often Docker volume backup directly, you know it's powerful, but it's environment variables and labels.

[00:04:16]There's no front end. Volume Vault is essentially the missing UI for it. If you're backing up Docker volumes and you don't have a real restore plan, this container should absolutely be on your list.

[00:04:28]Next up is RackHD. RackHD is a self-hosted infrastructure inventory and operations app built specifically for home labs and labs. It has racks, devices, ports, cables, IP address management, VLANs, Wi-Fi, compute discovery, monitoring, and topology visualization all in one place. It is absolutely feature-rich. As you can see by the dashboard, there's a ton going on here. Within the labs, I can pick and start all new labs if I want to have multiple locations simultaneously. I have the ability to build racks within the home lab that I've chosen. It shows me a list of devices available on the network. I can calculate compute based on how much compute I've given each node and how much each service on the node is taking from it. It has Wi-Fi and it has automatic discovery on your LAN. The monitoring page is actually pretty cool.

[00:05:14]Right now, of course, this is just a demo, so it's going to show you everything is failing, but you can do so much here with ports, cabling, showing VLANs. It even has an IPAM option here if you've got a lot of enterprise-class hardware. The visualizer is also really stunning to show how each port uses what cable to connect to what machine living in your racks. It is absolutely insane how much this guy packed into a single container. So, if you're one of those guys who really, really likes just getting a ton of detail and documentation into your home lab, this container does everything.

[00:05:50]Next up is Catalog IT. Catalog IT is a web app for tracking the hardware and software of an IT team. Think of it as asset and service inventory aimed more at the small business or IT department side of things. Within services, I can see a bunch of things that my {quote} organization is running, and I can see the hardware that I've distributed to my employees. The cool part is I can look at planning renewals and see if there's certain things coming up for renewal this month, and I can look at a cost report now actually show me what is costing, and I get not only an actual but an actual versus estimate versus budget and my estimated versus budget, which is really cool for business case reporting. Looking at the people tab, I can see everybody in my org. It has OIDC built into it along with notifications as well as an audit log to show me everything that's been happening on the instance.

[00:06:38]Next up is Sherly. Sherly is a self-hosted file sharing platform with a clean web interface, ShareX integration, and full API access. You upload screenshots, files, and media and then share them instantaneously with short links. The web UI is a simple drag-and-drop upload with a searchable gallery that you can filter by type. The container supports code syntax highlighting, image zoom inline, video and audio stream with proper seeking, and PDFs render right in the browser.

[00:07:05]Uploading is crazy easy. All I have to do is press the upload button and then I can just simply drag and drop into the interface, upload a file, and it's ready to go. When I go back to my gallery, I can see my video, and I can play it right here in the web browser. The headline feature for a lot of folks is going to be the ShareX integration, one-click downloads via a config file.

[00:07:26]ShareX imports it, and now every screenshot you take goes straight into your own server with a short link on your clipboard. Sharing things via a short link is really simple. I can just click my logo, click the share link button, and I have the option to give it a label or password or download limit or an expiration date. If if don't want to do any of that, I can just simply create a link, copy the link, and then send it to anybody I want. Shortly also features a full admin dashboard that'll give you a complete overview of all your files, all your users, and everything going on inside the instance. If I click my user in the top right and then go to the audit log, I can see a complete list with filters of every single activity that's happened on the server. I can clear my filter, go back to my settings, and also change things like the privacy policy, the file retention, session duration, and all the things you see here.

[00:08:13]Next up is AppShots. AppShots is a free open-source app store and Google Play screenshot generator. It's the tool you use to make those polished frame marketing screenshots when you're publishing a mobile app. That's not the only time you really need to make these.

[00:08:26]I see a ton of people in a business case where they need to have an image where it's on a phone and it looks like somebody's holding the phone, or maybe the phone looks really cool and it makes the presentation look snappier. It's super easy to go ahead and manipulate this. You have an option to pick your device here on the left. You can change the color of the device. I'm just going to leave it black for now. And on the right, I'm going to upload an image.

[00:08:45]Once I have my image uploaded, I can go ahead and change the way this whole thing works. So, right now my layout is flat, but I can go to 3D, and then I can start changing the rotation on the Y axis, and maybe a little bit on the X axis forward or back. You have some pre-selected positions here. I could also change the text by going all the way to the bottom and giving it a new headline, and then give it a new sub headline. And now I can change the background on it to something like a gradient. And now that I've got that, I've got this really cool image I can just download. I can move this text around if I want, and I have something that I could use for a presentation or whatever it is that I want to use it for without having to go through a lot of chat GPT or nano banana generation to make it look like this. Save your tokens and use this app. It's totally free and it works really, really well.

[00:09:31]Last up is email signature generator, and I know you all are laughing at me right now, but let's be honest. Work mail is an inconvenient truth that all of us have to deal with at our jobs and having a professional looking signature actually legitimately helps. Right now, this is the placeholder information and you just get to enter your name, your contact information, and you can upload your company's logo. I have the opportunity to add my social links and the nice thing is it's automatically going to include the icons down here for you. You can include a disclaimer which you can just check it off or check it on and then enter your company's disclaimer if you have one and it kicks out this nice signature block for you which you can either just copy or copy the HTML source. There are directions at the bottom for how to upload it into Outlook, Gmail, or Apple Mail. And even though this might seem like a super pedestrian thing, it just made my life a lot easier so I wanted to share it with you guys. Thank you all for watching another summary of the Self-Hosted Newsletter. If you like this video, click the thumbs up button to give it a like and make sure you subscribe to this channel to get the latest videos about all things self-hosted. Leave a comment below if there are containers you wanted to see make this list or containers you're already using and absolutely love. If you want to have a longer conversation with us, jump in our Discord server. You can find the invite link in the video description below. If you want to say thank you, please use the Buy Me a Coffee link in the video description below. I make these summaries every single month. If you've never seen them before, check out the YouTube playlist linked in the video description below to go back into some previous months for apps you may have missed. Thanks for watching everybody and as always, stay curious.