Compose-friendly picks for reverse proxy, vault, photos, and a homepage — a practical first rack.
Orivana
Independent publisher · Ben Liu
Original operator guides with lab notes — backups, upgrades, and failure modes — not scraped blog dumps. 60 guides and 10 collections; the catalog is a reference map when you already know the job.
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Editorial
Independently published by Ben Liu. We write original operator guides with lab notes — not scraped blog mirrors. Topic playbooks and collections come first; the catalog is a reference map when you already know the job.
Currently 60 guides, 15 topics, 10 collections, and 151 featured reviews. New here? Start with Getting started. Questions? Use Contact.
Operator guide to running Ollama at home — install paths, Docker, model disk gravity, GPU vs CPU, API exposure, and a sane first weekend with Open WebUI.
How to auto-issue and renew TLS certificates with Caddy, Traefik, Certbot, or Nginx Proxy Manager - HTTP-01 vs DNS-01, renewals, and failure alerts.
A practical comparison framework for personal knowledge bases — sync, search, mobile, and backup.
Also browse 15 topic playbooks and 10 curated stacks.
Practical writing on backups, Docker hardening, licenses, and more.
Operator guide to running Ollama at home — install paths, Docker, model disk gravity, GPU vs CPU, API exposure, and a sane first weekend with Open WebUI.
How to auto-issue and renew TLS certificates with Caddy, Traefik, Certbot, or Nginx Proxy Manager - HTTP-01 vs DNS-01, renewals, and failure alerts.
Decide when uptime checks and disk alerts are enough versus when Prometheus-style stacks earn their keep in a small homelab.
Write a one-hour handoff pack so a partner or friend can restart services, restore from backup, and contact you with useful facts.
A practical calendar for beginners: one service, TLS, backups, light hardening, and a family handoff — with lab notes from review stacks.
When peer-to-peer folder sync beats a collaboration suite — conflict files, sharing portals, backups, and household fit.
Editorial guidance above the raw lists — how to choose before you filter.
Operator guidance for privacy-first analytics — metrics that matter, consent, and maintenance load.
How to evaluate CMS options for blogs and brochure sites — migration, plugins, and day-2 ops.
Moderation load, federation choices, and security expectations for community software.
Threat modeling and backup practices before you import bank CSVs into a home server.
Pick trackers that match your ceremony budget — issues, boards, or full suites.
How to adopt self-hosted automation without creating undebugable brittle pipelines.
Curated collections
Editor-assembled stacks for common jobs. Each card links into full project pages with pros, cons, and FAQ.
Compose-friendly picks for reverse proxy, vault, photos, and a homepage — a practical first rack.
DNS filtering, sync, notes, and analytics with fewer third parties in the path.
Photos, movies, audiobooks, and a living-room friendly streaming core.
Git hosting, project boards, and low-code building blocks for a private engineering space.
Wikis, OCR document vaults, and PDF utilities for households and tiny offices.
Blogging, CMS, newsletters-adjacent publishing, and first-party analytics.
Monitoring, reverse proxy, updates awareness, and a dashboard — the boring layer that keeps experiments alive.
Remote admin without casually opening every port — vault, proxy, and browser-based access patterns.
RSS, later-reading, and bookmarks — keep articles and links off opaque SaaS timelines.
Personal notes, a small wiki, and light tasks — documentation that survives phone swaps.
FAQ
Orivana is an independently published discovery site for self-hosted open-source software, operated by Ben Liu. You can browse projects by category, language, license, and Docker support, and read original guides on backups, security, networking, and operations.
Ben Liu publishes Orivana as an independent site. Corrections and privacy requests go to support@orivana.xyz, typically within 2-3 business days.
The software is often free as in freedom / free as in price, but hosting is not free. You pay with hardware, electricity, domains, backup storage, and your time for updates and incidents.
No, but Docker Compose is a practical default for many beginners because it packages dependencies and makes rebuilds repeatable. Some projects install natively via packages or binaries.
Only tools we ran on review benches with written lab notes — not paid placements or scraped summaries.
Trust & methods
Orivana is an independent operator publication. Guides and lab notes come first; the reference catalog is only a map for people who already know the job they need done.