Hobbyist's Hideaway

A home server can revolutionize how you manage your digital life, and you don't need a bulky, power-hungry machine to do it. The humble Raspberry Pi is more than capable of handling a variety of server duties.

What You'll Need

Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 (4GB or more recommended)
A good quality microSD card (32GB+)
Power supply and a case with cooling
An external hard drive for storage

Step 1: Install the Operating System

We'll use Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) for a lightweight, headless setup. Use the Raspberry Pi Imager to flash the OS to your microSD card. In the advanced settings, be sure to enable SSH, set a hostname, and configure your user account.

# After booting, connect via SSH
ssh your_username@your_hostname.local

Step 2: Install Docker & Portainer

Docker makes it incredibly easy to manage services in isolated containers. Portainer provides a nice web UI to manage your Docker environment.

# Install Docker
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker your_username

# Install Portainer
docker volume create portainer_data
docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9443:9443 --name portainer \
    --restart=always \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    -v portainer_data:/data \
    portainer/portainer-ce:latest

Now you can access Portainer at https://your_pi_ip:9443 and start deploying services like a Samba file share, a Plex media server, or a Pi-hole ad-blocker!