Self-Hosting Stirling PDF on Kubernetes

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If you work with PDFs regularly and you’re running your own infrastructure, Stirling PDF is hard to beat. It’s a self-hosted, web-based PDF toolbox with over 50 operations — merge, split, compress, convert, OCR, edit, watermark, rotate, and a whole lot more. It’s built on Java/Spring Boot with LibreOffice and Tesseract doing the heavy lifting under the hood. At 75,000+ GitHub stars and counting, it’s become one of the most popular self-hosted apps in the homelab community.

In this post I’ll walk through how I deploy it on my Talos Linux Kubernetes cluster using Ansible and the official Helm chart, and break down what you get on the free tier versus a paid plan.

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Dispatcharr: Watch TV from Any IPTV Provider, Anywhere — and Keep It Running When Streams Fail

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If you’ve ever wanted to consolidate multiple IPTV providers, watch live TV from anywhere over the internet, and never have a stream die on you without a backup ready to go — Dispatcharr is the tool you’ve been looking for.

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Hosting WordPress on Kubernetes with Traefik and a Wildcard Certificate

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After successfully setting up my wildcard certificate using cert-manager (as I covered in my previous guide), I decided to take the next step — deploying my personal WordPress site, thedougie.com, on my Kubernetes cluster. By switching to Cloudflared and Traefik (see my recent post), I’ve eliminated the need for firewall holes to expose services directly, … Read more

Running Cloudflared with Traefik on My K3s Cluster

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By switching to Cloudflared, I was able to remove the firewall rules I originally had that allowed external traffic from Cloudflare’s network to communicate directly with my cluster.This not only simplifies the overall design but also adds another layer of security to the setup. As with any technology, things are constantly evolving and changing. I … Read more

Automating TLS Certificates in Kubernetes with cert-manager and Cloudflare

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If you’re running Kubernetes and want automatic HTTPS for your services, cert-manager is one of the best tools available. It integrates directly with Let’s Encrypt to handle certificate requests, renewals, and management. In my setup, I wanted to: To make the process easier to repeat, I split the configuration into four Ansible playbooks: cert-manager Helm … Read more

From NFS to Longhorn: Optimizing Persistent Storage on My Kubernetes Cluster

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When I first set up my Kubernetes cluster using OrangePi CM4 boards on the Turing Pi V2, storage was a challenge. Since the OrangePi CM4 didn’t support NVMe and SATA across the four nodes, I resorted to NFS mounts for persistent volume storage. While this worked, it wasn’t the most efficient solution, especially for performance-intensive … Read more