Build A Raspberry Pi Home Server In 30 Minutes

Want to stream your music, create Dropbox-like storage or even host your own website? Nik Rawlinson provides step-by-step advice on doing precisely that

- Nik Rawlinson

The ideal home server is quiet, reliable and light on power – just like the Raspberry Pi. Better yet, the Raspberry Pi is cheap. The board itself costs less than £40 and the Raspbian operating system is free. If you have an old monitor, keyboard and mouse going begging, you can usually power it using a regular USB power supply, so all you need to add is a microSD card to boot from.

Over the next four pages, we’ll show you how you can turn a regular Raspberry Pi into a fully-fledged home server for photos, storage and media streaming – in half an hour or less. We’re using the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, but the instructions are the same if you’re using one of its predecessors. The benefit of the Pi 3 B+, if you haven’t yet bought one, is that it has a faster processor and runs cooler. It can still manage with a passive heatsink (around £3) or, in many cases, no heatsink at all, allowing you to keep the server under your TV without being disturbed by constantly running fans.

Initial installation

You can find clear and detailed instructions for setting up a factory fresh Pi at raspberrypi.org/ documentation/setup. The board can run several different operating systems, but we’re using Raspbian for the main server functions. We would recommend doing the same if you want to follow along. As the Pi boots from microSD, there’s nothing to prevent you installing several different operating systems – including Debian, Ubuntu and OSMC – on separate cards and swapping them as appropriate.