Guide
Recipes with 32-bit ARM images and a memory budget a Pi can meet — plus the two hardware decisions that matter more than the application you pick.
Almost everything that makes a Pi succeed or fail as a server is decided before the first container starts. The storage is the first decision: an SD card is a consumable, and a database that writes constantly will wear one out — a USB SSD turns the same board into something you can leave alone for years. The second is the operating system’s architecture. A 64-bit image on a 64-bit board is worth choosing deliberately, because it opens the arm64 half of the catalog; the recipes on this page were picked to work either way.
The third question is what a Pi is bad at, and the answer is consistent: anything that converts media on the fly, or runs a machine-learning model over a photo library. Those recipes exist in the catalog and they are honest about wanting real hardware. Serving files, resolving names, polling feeds and answering a few hundred requests an hour is the shape of work a board like this does well.
Give the machine swap on the SSD, keep the data directories off the boot card, and treat the Pi as what it is: a small, quiet computer that is very good at a handful of jobs and best not asked to do the others.
Sets
The sum of the minimums the recipes below declare. It is a floor, not a recommendation: leave room for the operating system, backups and growth.
Why it is here: The classic reason to own a Pi. It answers DNS for the whole house on 256 MB, and a board dedicated to it keeps the household's internet independent of whatever else you are experimenting with.
Why it is here: A Pi makes a good always-on sync peer: it is the device that never sleeps, so the laptop and the phone find each other through it. Watch the file count rather than the file size.
Why it is here: Music streams straight from the disk with no re-encoding, which is exactly the workload a Pi is good at. Expect the first library scan to take a while on an SD card.
Why it is here: A monitor is worth more on separate hardware than on the machine it watches, and a Pi is the cheapest separate hardware there is.
Why it is here: Small enough to share a board with everything else here, and valuable enough to be the one service you back up off the Pi on a schedule.
Why it is here: Polling feeds is periodic, light work that fits a small board well. The archive is the part that grows, so keep it on external storage rather than on the boot card.