.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
Portainer installed, dashboard empty, and the real question arrives: what programs should a homelab via Portainer run? I've built this list the expensive way, by deploying most of the self-hosted catalog over the years and quietly removing half of it. What follows is opinionated on purpose: the apps that survived, grouped by what they do for you, in roughly the order I'd deploy them on a fresh box.
Every one of them installs as a stack in minutes using the pattern from our Portainer stacks guide, so this page is the menu rather than the cooking.
The infrastructure layer first
Boring picks first because everything else leans on them. Nginx Proxy Manager gives every later app a clean HTTPS address instead of a growing zoo of :port numbers; deploy it early because retrofitting a proxy under twelve running apps is a weekend, and doing it first is an hour. Uptime Kuma watches everything you deploy afterwards and messages you when something dies, which converts your homelab from "discovered broken by your spouse" to "fixed before anyone noticed". And Vaultwarden (the lightweight Bitwarden server) is the single most life-improving container in the whole hobby, in my view: the family's passwords, on your hardware, synced to every device. Guard its data volume like it's money.
A seperate word on backups before anything precious lands: whatever runs here, its volumes need copies leaving the machine. Duplicati and restic both containerize nicely; pick one the same week you deploy anything from the next section.
The daily drivers
These are the apps non-technical household members will use without knowing or caring what Docker is, which is the highest bar self-hosting clears.
Immich replaces Google Photos with automatic phone backup, face recognition and search that understands sentences; it's the heaviest app on this page and the most rewarding, and our Immich install guide covers giving it the resources and backups it deserves. Jellyfin does the same job for your media collection, streaming it to every TV and phone in the house with zero subscriptions; the Jellyfin setup guide pairs it with sane remote access. Nextcloud rounds out the trio for files, calendars and contacts if you're leaving the whole Google estate; it's the most demanding of the three to keep happy, so I'd rank it "when ready" rather than day one.
The automation and dashboard tier
n8n is the workflow engine that ends up gluing the rest together (notifications when Uptime Kuma alerts, media requests filed into chats, small scheduled jobs you'd otherwise cron and forget); our n8n self-hosting guide goes deep on running it properly. Homepage or Heimdall gives the whole collection a front door, one bookmark for the household instead of a ports lecture. And Watchtower exists for people who want containers updating themselves; I run it nowhere and update deliberately instead, a disagreement the community enjoys having. You now know both positions, pick your side.
The media-adjacent stack
Around Jellyfin grows a well-known constellation: Jellyseerr for requests (the family asks for things through a pretty UI instead of texting you), the *arr suite for library management and a download client of your persuasion. Each is a small stack, they compose into something coherent and the whole cluster is the classic homelab gateway drug. Budget an evening for the first pass and accept that tuning it becomes a hobby of its own; there are worse hobbies.
Server sizing and deploy order
What runs all of this? More machine than a Pi once Immich and Jellyfin both arrive, less than people fear otherwise. Something like 4 vCPU and 8 GB with generous disk covers the full list on this page for a household; the daily drivers want the resources, the infrastructure layer barely registers. RAM is the ceiling you'll hit first, disk is the one that costs money, and where the library outgrows the machine our storage VPS tiers exist precisely for the photo-and-media half of the problem.
The deploy order I'd defend: proxy manager, Uptime Kuma and backups the first week; Vaultwarden the second, once backups demonstrably work; then one daily driver at a time, living with each before adding the next. The failure mode this order prevents is real and common: fifteen apps deployed in a weekend of enthusiasm, none monitored, none backed up, all abandoned by spring. A homelab that grows one working service at a time still exists in five years, and Portainer makes that pace pleasant, every app a green stack you understand because you added it on purpose.
