About Chikewa

Chikewa is an independent self-hosting resource for people who would rather run their own software than rent a subscription. We write guides for home servers, Docker setups and the services that live on them — from your first Raspberry Pi to a full media and backup stack.

What makes Chikewa different

We test it before we tell you to run it. Every compose file, every step and every setting in a Chikewa guide has run on real hardware in our lab before it is published. When something breaks the way it broke for us — a restart loop, an SSL error, a version mismatch — we document the real error and the real fix, because that is the moment a tutorial usually gives up on you.

That means the guides here contain measured RAM numbers, the exact commands we actually ran, and the mistakes we actually made. It is a slower way to publish and a more useful way to read.

Who this is for

• New to self-hosting — start at Start Here and follow the path from hardware to a working server.
• Comfortable with Linux — jump straight to the guides for the services you want to run.
• Curious what is worth running — browse the software index and the recommended stack.

How guides are tested

Each guide is built against a live lab: a Debian machine with Docker, running the exact compose file the guide shows. We check that the service starts, that it behaves as described, and we measure the resource usage with docker stats. Guides carry a “Tested on” box with the OS, Docker version, hardware and the date of the last test — so you always know how fresh the information is.

No sponsorships buying recommendations

We may earn a commission from some affiliate links, at no extra cost to you, but no vendor can buy a place in our recommendations. A service appears here because it survived being run, configured and broken in our lab — not because of a deal.