Software

Traefik is an open source reverse proxy and load balancer built for containerized environments. Its defining feature is automatic service discovery: point it at a Docker host, add labels to your containers, and Traefik provisions routes as services come up without manual configuration. I’m using it as the front door for my homelab, handling TLS termination via Let’s Encrypt and routing traffic to the appropriate backends. Getting there involved some genuine frustration. Running it is largely painless. On balance, it’s highly recommended—but go in knowing that “simple setup” undersells the actual process.

Both Umami and Plausible are open source, privacy-focused web analytics platforms that run in Docker, collect visitor metrics without cookies, and position themselves as GDPR-compliant alternatives to Google Analytics. I ran both simultaneously on my personal sites to decide which to keep long-term. My conclusion was Umami, and it wasn’t particularly close once I moved past surface aesthetics. The deciding factors were practical: API flexibility, navigational coherence, and—counterintuitively—Plausible’s own setup flow working against it. Plausible is marginally prettier in places, but it squanders that advantage with some genuinely puzzling navigation decisions.

Uptime Kuma is an open source, self-hosted monitoring tool that tracks the availability of your services and alerts you when something goes down. After a few weeks of running it via Docker Compose to monitor both my homelab services and sites running on external hosting, my overall impression is quite positive—but there are some structural concerns that may send me looking for alternatives down the road.

Setup and First Impressions

Getting Uptime Kuma running is straightforward. A single service in a Docker Compose file, a volume for persistence, and you’re at the web interface within minutes. There’s no separate database server to configure, no complex dependency chain—it uses an embedded SQLite database and handles everything through the browser.