Not for me as I’m not an iOS user, but I contribute to all FOSS software I find useful as it helps motivate the developer and why should everything be free? My time sure as hell isn’t.
So a small fee for a well developed product, that offers something handy and keeps getting support is more than acceptable. Also, it sets a barrier to entry for making it good. If you expect users to pay $5/$10 for something that is your hobby, it had better be good.
Good luck with it.
I recommend the Colota app for tracking. I use a mix of Reitti and Dawarich at the moment to log the info (both of which support sharing) as I can’t work out which I prefer.
I use a Pangolin reverse proxy with OIDC (PocketID) for family access to services, along with CrowdSec. For the Immich app access which needs to bypass auth login through the reverse proxy, I use ‘link share’ in Pangolin that gives me header tokens that can be entered in to the Immich app under Advanced settings.
I’ve been an Immich user for over 2 years now, so it’s been a journey for me to implement it to this standard.
Or as someone else suggests, try CloudFlare with something like Google Auth login. Just be aware that you are then exposing all your traffic to Cloudflare. I take that as a small sacrifice for simplicity.
Ah thanks. I know I have scratched the surface with what MA can do, and it is one of the more useful things I self host. Music Assistant and Immich are the absolute must haves.
Thanks for that. Read Pt1 and it all makes sense.
I’ve found that Music Assistant has worked well for group casting audio for me with Google Minis and Chromecast Audios. Although I’ve not had it running all day, but it has removed the hassle of it stopping from WiFi disconnects from my phone.
Always looking for new ways to do things, so will look out for pts 2 & 3.
You can run docker stacks with external IPs, no? I run all mine from Unraid, through Dockhand as compose stacks, with some ports on the host, others as external IPs on VLANs. But yes, like you I would actually like to move them to VMs so it’s easier to backup, and service, without taking the host server offline.
It starts to get like Inception levels of depth on VMs and hosts!
Take from this anything of use to you: I syncthing my important Unraid server stuff to a MacBook running Backblaze with a 14TB external drive. DNS is handled by NextDNS in the cloud anyway, so it’s just Immich and other random family oriented services for me. I use Pangolin for exposed services.
You could use syncthing (or Resilio) over a tailscale or headscale network or whateveritispeopleuse to a remote PC.
My Docker compose files and VMs are backed up once a week via plugins on Unraid, which of course get duped via syncthing to the MacBook.
I did try a Hetzner Storage Box for a while to replace Backblaze, but the hassle of having to keep an eye on the syncing was a pain and I fell back in to Backblaze on the MacBook as it’s a set and forget (as long as they don’t change the filetypes ignored…). I may go back to a Storage Box again.
I do also want to look into redundancy with a spare server though so it becomes quicker/easier to get it all up and running in event of failure. This is where selfhosting starts getting serious!
Just chucking this out there to help with the fediverse.
I ran BI for years, but left them for a Ubiquiti device. Yes it required new cameras, and of course the investment in a UniFi device, but damn is UniFi Protect good. Does great detection and no subscription or fees of any kind, plus gets frequent updates and feature improvents. Not a solution for everyone, but I believed the hype of BI for years and thought there was nothing better. Turns out there is.
Hi mxdcodes. I have been using your app for the past month in a sort of testing phase with Darawich. I have used GPS Logger and Reitti since October last year, which is still running, but Colota offers a lot more exciting possibilities of data collection and so I’ll probably switch across pretty soon. I got hit by the bug a while back of it stopping once entering a geofence, but I saw that got fixed promptly so thanks for all of this.
I love all that you and others who code for the (wider) selfhosted community offer, so let me say that for every person criticizing your app and all the effort you have put in, there are hopefully 1000x more of us who are truly grateful for what you and others do. I find it odd that people who are concerned about having their location history hacked by someone are actually wanting to record their location history in the first place. Seems the obvious answer is to… not track your location history with ANY app.
Keep up the good work!
Good to hear!
However I may have spoken too soon with Colota… it stopped registering my location after a first trip, and wouldn’t restart tracking until I restarted my phone (GrapheneOS Pixel 9). I need to look at the logs and maybe raise an issue.
Dawarich has had some great updates in the past few weeks, and I’m hoping Colota + Dawarich is my future family tracker system as they both have a very nice feel to them.
GPS Logger + Reitti is my background system atm while I mess with Colota & Dawarich.
I’ve been using Colota this weekend sending data to a Dawarich server. I like that you can filter out inaccurate GPS readings by setting an accuracy threshold, so this removes any false points that I tend to get with other location apps.
I’ve tried GPS Logger for Reitti, and the new Android Dawarich app, but so far, Colota seems the best (early days). It has the nicest ui as well.
In terms of what to enter, you need to find out what HA requires for the URL to receive data, then set that in the Colota app. Colota will just store the location data until you set a remote end for it to connect to.
I haven’t tried TBH. Because the VPS is restricted to my home IP for SSH using Hetzner’s firewall, I wireguard to home, then SSH to the VPS direct. I’ve been updating Pangolin since last summer, but haven’t really played with the newer features. I should have a proper look really.
I do this currently. I have a Hetzner VPS with Pangolin, giving access to family services like Immich etc, and my own nerdy services I keep locked to my home IP, and if I’m away from home, I tunnel in with Wireguard and hence then the home IP kicks in and they work.
You can issue traefik IP rules with Pangolin as well to limit what IPs can access services.
I have Pangolin and all family services behind Pocket ID with passkey only auth.
The VPS I protect with Hetzner’s firewall, so only SSH is allowed from my home IP.
The whole setup is as secure as I can make it. My family would just roll their eyes at any VPN I asked them to use, so it has to be publicly accessible for some things annoyingly.
I also have private services coming direct to my home firewall away from the VPS (for speed efficiency), and for truly public services (websites), I have those tunneled through a Cloudflare tunnel that can handle Google Auth for WordPress login pages etc.
It made me uncomfortable to start with using the VPS, but in time, confidence grows.
Moved all my Unraid ‘apps’ to Dockhand, and linked my Pangolin VPS with the Hawser agent. I had Dockge for a while on newer container deployments, but wanted something a bit more playful, Dockhand is it.
I degoogled my GMail last year to Infomaniak, which was OK, but moved to Fastmail last week, which I now love! Setting the custom domain pulled in the sites favicon for the Fastmail account header, which made me smile too much for such a simple thing. Think I’ll be on Fastmail for the future. (Background syncing with the new Bichon email archiver).
Thanks for your comment. I’ve had Infomaniak for the past year but find the UI/UX annoying. Same with Mailbox which I used for a few months before that. I’ve just tried Fastmail and love it already. Does everything I wanted Infomaniak to do. Davx with auto configure, Google calendar sync. And like you say, the apps are slick.
I was just thinking this week, that those who self host (and more importantly, those who program the code we self host), are at the front line of the modern digital resistance: in the sense that the world is burning due to the greed of the tech bros that run our daily lives. Convienience for the masses is what gives them power over us, and any one who rejects their systems is helping to fight back.
Voting with your wallet helps, so not giving them your money is the first step. Then managing and keeping your own data private is the next one.
2024 was the year I got more serious with self hosting and migrating away from the cloud offered by Google etc. But 2025 was the year I pushed to run all my own services and get the family on board as well; trying to educate my kids with running our own services (the wife is so not interested!).
There were some really cool projects released last year and some oddly well-timed ones as I was looking for various services, and Jotty was one of those!
Thanks so much for you work and rest assured amongst the negativity you may receive in certain corners of the web, there are people truly appreciative of yours, and others like you, hard work.
Sometimes all it takes is a random comment from a fellow self-hoster to put me on another journey… Thanks for the tip on passkeys and Pocket ID! Love the Pocket ID guides on all popular services. This looks to make it much easier for family logins to all my services. I’m starting the migration now already from Pangolin and inward.
I love the seemingly never-ending journey of self hosting!
Pangolin is a reverse proxy, so it can forward a URL to any backend service on any port. But you’re right in that you have to be signed in on the browser you access it on. Therefore an app won’t directly work without prior login. You can create a ‘shareable link’ in Pangolin, which I use for the Immich app. This gives me header tokens that the Immich app can take in its advanced settings, and that’s how that one works.
I’ve recently moved away from dedicated apps for mobile services and toward web-based access for most things (I use Music Assistant in browser). This isn’t perfect for everything and everyone, but I realise now with your question that it’s worked well for me transitioning to Pangolin (and at least Immich app works).
B for me, because it was the first Google image search that came up about 15 years ago for ‘cat 5e wiring’. And that’s probably all there is to explain the result in here.
Shoutout to the guy who also had a video explaining what the little plastic figure of 8s were I got in the pack (to segregate the wires).