Foyer is a Linux distribution that ships a handful of self-hosted services in one image: Actual Budget, Pi-hole, Jellyfin and Vaultwarden. You write the image to a card, boot the board, and the services are already running. Setting up a home server usually means installing a distro and then installing everything on top of it. I wanted to skip the second half.
How it is built #
It is a Yocto distribution rather than a preinstalled Debian. There is a custom distro layer and an application layer, and each service is a recipe with its own systemd units instead of a container dropped on top of a general-purpose OS.
Builds are driven by kas, so they are reproducible and cover several machines from the same configuration. I target Raspberry Pi hardware and QEMU, which means I can test an image without flashing anything.
Yocto costs more up front than apt. You assemble a userland instead of installing one, and the first build takes an afternoon. What you get back is an image where every package is there because a recipe asked for it. On a machine meant to sit in a cupboard for two years, that is the trade I want.