Marko | Vienna

How I run production-ready services at home on a Raspberry Pi using Dokploy and Cloudflare Tunnels—no port forwarding, no static IP, minimal cost.

Self-hosting at home used to mean fighting NAT, dynamic IPs, and sketchy port forwarding. That’s no longer necessary.

This setup uses a Raspberry Pi, Dokploy, and Cloudflare Tunnels to create a small but serious home PaaS that’s secure, cheap, and boring to operate—in a good way.

Why self-host at home

Full control over data and infrastructure
Fixed hardware cost, zero monthly server bill
Ideal for internal tools, side projects, and early-stage products

A Raspberry Pi is more than enough if you’re not doing heavy compute. Most web apps are I/O-bound, not CPU-bound.

Fun fact: This entire website runs on a Raspberry Pi at home—frontend, backend, and database—all self-hosted and kept private behind Cloudflare Tunnel.

Dokploy: lightweight PaaS

Dokploy sits on top of Docker and gives:

App deployments via Git
Traefik-based routing
Environment management
Clean UI without Kubernetes complexity

It’s opinionated, simple, and fits the Pi perfectly.

Cloudflare Tunnel: the missing piece

Cloudflare Tunnel removes all inbound exposure:

No open ports
No static IP
No router configuration
Origin server is never public

Traffic flow:
DNS → Cloudflare → Tunnel → Traefik → Container

This alone makes home hosting viable.

Security model

Services only accessible through Cloudflare
Optional Zero Trust access per app
TLS handled by Cloudflare
Pi never exposed to the internet directly

Attack surface stays minimal.

What this is good for

Personal dashboards
Internal tools
APIs
Early MVPs
Client demos

What it’s not good for

High-traffic consumer apps
Heavy background jobs
Anything that needs horizontal scaling

Final thoughts

This setup replaces a VPS for a large class of projects. It’s not “for fun” infrastructure—it’s practical.

If your app fits the constraints, a Raspberry Pi + Dokploy + Cloudflare Tunnel is hard to beat!