Another month, another stack of bills for a music app, a movie app, cloud storage — all for things I could technically host myself. So I did.
That question turned into a home server on a repurposed laptop, a full Docker stack, and a Python pipeline that's had four separate fights with YouTube's anti-bot systems in a single week. And once I had a server I actually controlled, the ideas didn't stop — a personal webpage, automations, my own music/movie player, an AI agent to manage it all. Here's how it came together.
The setup
A 16GB/i5 laptop I wasn't using became a Debian 13 VM (headless, VirtualBox), reachable from anywhere via Tailscale. One Docker stack runs on top:
Jellyfin — my own Netflix
Navidrome — my own Spotify
Samba — a network drive from any device
Portainer / Homepage — management + dashboard
PostgreSQL — shared DB engine
Pi-hole — network-wide ad block (in progress)
No more monthly bills for things a spare laptop can do for free.
The hard part: filling it with music
Hosting a Spotify clone is easy. Filling it with your actual library isn't. Spotify's Feb 2026 API change blocked the clean OAuth route, so I improvised: export playlists as CSVs (via Exportify), then built MusicVault — a pipeline that parses them, finds each track on YouTube, downloads it, and auto-generates playlists Navidrome can serve.
5,748 tracks. 97 playlists. Starting from zero.
Four fights with YouTube
Storage — FLAC files were about to blow past my 200GB disk. Switched everything to MP3.
Silent failures — my own script was hiding the real error. Fixed the logging first, which revealed YouTube's bot-check. Fixed with browser cookies.
"Format not available" — YouTube now requires solving a JS challenge for some streams. Installed a JS runtime + solver, and caught a sneaky bug where ~ silently failed inside a command flag.
Mass 403 errors — a live, actively-evolving yt-dlp issue other users were hitting that same week. Fixed by forcing a different YouTube client. Even the fix had a gotcha: a tabs-vs-spaces mismatch silently blocked my first patch attempt.
Four unrelated failure modes, back to back — each one real debugging, not copy-paste.
What's next
A personal webpage, hosted off the server
Automations — disk monitoring, auto-cleanup, alerts when things break
A custom-built music/movie player instead of default UIs
An AI agent layer to manage the server in plain language
Eventually: Nextcloud, Gitea, self-hosted photo backup
What started as "stop paying for four apps" turned into a home-lab I'm still adding to every week — and that's the part I like most.
