Thanks for the support! Trade-off: be potentially helpful if OP can’t find a turnkey solution, or stay upvoted, hmm…

Ah sweet you didn’t have to make something yourself

Haha, yeah. Thanks for taking the time to read the downvoted suggestion! I had been reading Hacker News and was feeling daring.

Both not a likely problem with any recent model and absolutely mitigated by using it in a VM with snapshots, which, besides being good practice, is a technology that I expect selfhosters to be familiar with anyway.

If there are objections to major models, (economic, resource, moral, etc), this application is achievable with a self-hosted Qwen or similar, although it will take additional nudging. That’s harder to get started with, though, which is why I didn’t suggest it. Self-hosted Gemma 4 I would absolutely recommend using in a VM, it really likes to erase projects and start over, in my experience.

I hope that helps!

I’m going to voice an incredibly contentious opinion here and suggest that this is a perfect situation for buying a month of Claude and vibe coding a piece of bespoke software for yourself with it.

I am not an expert but I’ve dabbled on this before some years ago. I’m taking a swing at this not knowing what Caddy is.

If you don’t need it exposed publicly, you just need a local DNS server like bind or dnsmasq set up somewhere on the local network, or edit the hosts files on your individual machines to hard code your local network service IPs for those machines. You don’t need a purchased domain name to advertise domains locally. It’s probably also possible for each machine to advertise its DNS without a central server, but it’s outside of my expertise.

Exposing port services with a domain name is a lot trickier but it’s doable in various ways. A cursory search says SRV records or setting up a proxy on your local network. It’s been a long time since I’ve attempted this. Optimally your host and client will just be configured to use the correct ports already, like port 80 for http and port 443 for https and whatever the default port is for your other services, so that you can use the same hostname per IP.

Since it’s all on your local network I wouldn’t bother with encryption/self signed certs, unless your risk profile includes randos on your network sniffing your services (spying on your network traffic while connected to your network).

I don’t have guides handy but maybe some of those keywords will help. If you’re not staunchly anti-ai, it’s a common enough scenario for something like chatgpt to guide you through.