7 best self-hosted apps for coders (2025)

Whether you’re a gaming enthusiast, bibliophile, or productivity-centric everyday user, you'll find a handful of self-hosted services that cater to your needs. If you're into coding, there are a ton of applications that can aid in compiling complex projects, automating workflows, and serving painstakingly designed websites to clients. On that note, here’s my curated list of the best self-hosted applications every coder needs to try out.

An underrated set of utilities

True to its name, IT-Tools bundles 86 utilities inside a convenient, self-hosted solution, and it's a container I always run on my home server. That’s because most of these QoL tools make my coding life a lot easier. For instance, you’ve got syntax converters that can transform your JSON/YAML/TOML/XML code into different formats without incurring indentation errors in the process. Then you’ve got the Crontab generator and Chmod calculator, which are pretty useful if you want cheat sheets for their hard-to-remember syntax.

For Docker enthusiasts, you’ve got the Docker Run to Docker Compose converter, and it’s quite useful when you work with as many containerized services as I do. The HTML WYSIWYG editor is just as useful for web developers who want a quick way to generate HTML syntax from plaintext. And there are just as many other developer-oriented utilities on IT-Tools you can integrate into your workstation!

6 Vaultwarden

For your passwords and API keys

Password managers are a must-have for every user, but they’re especially useful when you’re a coder. That’s because you’ll end up relying on API keys, authentication codes, and secret tokens every once in a while. Considering that many API tokens can only be viewed at the time of creation, a password manager provides a reliable way for you to store all your secret codes.

Personally, Vaultwarden is my favorite password manager of the bunch because it offers most of Bitwarden’s features without the latter’s resource-hogging nature. While it can require a little elbow grease to deploy Vaultwarden, its low memory consumption makes it perfect for even the most low-end home servers.

5 Gitea

Your self-hosted Git repository

As someone who uses GitHub to store everything from my project files to home lab configs and Obsidian notes, I’ll admit that it’s a rock-solid platform for coders. However, there are times when you might want to store your project files on a completely self-hosted server. Perhaps you want to keep your personal projects away from the prying eyes of firms. Or maybe you want total control over your team’s code files whilst reducing the threat of data breaches.

That’s where Gitea comes in handy, as this neat utility lets you host your project files on a private server. Besides supporting template repositories, file-cloning, pull requests, revision history, and other essential GitHub functions, Gitea also lets you set up access privileges and configure MFA codes to ensure unauthorized users can’t access your meticulously coded project files.

4 Nginx

Or Caddy, if you want automatic HTTPS

From hosting your websites to helping you access your battalion of containers via personalized domains, reverse proxy services are a godsend for every coding enthusiast. If you don’t mind plowing through pages upon pages of documentation, you’ll find Nginx a solid addition to your self-hosted suite.

But for folks who don’t want to deal with Let’s Encrypt certificates and SSL redirects, Caddy is a rock-solid alternative to Ngnix, as it can automatically grab TLS certifications for your domains before routing all the traffic over the secure HTTPS protocol.

3 Ansible and Terraform

Automation for your VMs

Creating virtual machines and outfitting them with useful packages can start to get tedious after a while, especially when your projects involve running a handful of virtual guests. Thankfully, the Ansible and Terraform duo can ease your VM management woes.

You can start the automation suite by creating a .tf file with your virtual machine specifications and using it with a self-hosted Terraform instance to spin up the VMs. After that, you can leverage Ansible Playbooks to arm your virtual guest with the necessary packages. Sure, it may take a while to create the .tf and .yaml files, but you’ll save quite a lot of time when setting up the virtualized environments for your coding projects.

2 n8n

Automation for everything else

If you're willing to dive deeper into the automation rabbit hole, I recommend checking out n8n. With hundreds of integrations for the most popular applications in the computing space, n8n can help you automate every aspect of your coding life.

For example, you could create an n8n workflow that pings your Telegram and Slack channels every time there’s a pull request on your Gitea server. Or you could leverage its automation prowess in linking the different databases in your website. And if you’re into AI, n8n can help you create everything from an LLM-powered conversational agent to a full-on database analysis and evaluation workflow.

1 Code Server and JupyterLab

The IDE combo

Running an IDE on your local system is fine and all, but what if you wanted to edit code files from your smartphone, tablet, SBC, or other slow devices in your household? Well, you could deploy a Code Server container inside your workstation and use its web UI to work on your programming projects from any device.

If you’re as fond of VS Code as I am, you can merge its extensions directory with the one in your Code Server container, thereby allowing you to access the former’s massive set of plugins from your self-hosted IDE. Likewise, you can configure a self-hosted JupyterNotebook (or better yet, JupyterLabs) instance as a centralized note-taking server for your Python code.

Which self-hosted tool do you swear by for your coding projects?

Still, there are quite a lot of other services in the self-hosted landscape. Technically, Docker, Podman, Containerd, and other containerization tools are also self-hosted, and so are virtualization environments like Proxmox, XCP-ng, and Harvester. If you’re a web developer, a LAMP server can help you host your own websites. Or you can go the Flask route when testing your website.

Then there’s Uptime Kuma, which can monitor the rest of the containers in your coding workstation. You’ve also got self-hosted email servers like Mailcow, though I recommend setting aside an entire week for a project of this magnitude.