SideMini

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Mac mini as a home server: the complete setup

SideMini3 min read

A Mac mini makes an excellent home server: silent, ten to twenty watts idle, and it runs the Apple software nothing else can. What it is not, out of the box, is unattended. This is the full setup, in the order that avoids painting yourself into a corner.

Get in from another machine first

  1. System Settings → General → Sharing: turn on Remote Login for SSH and Screen Sharing for the desktop.
  2. Test both from a second device before going further. If you can only fix the Mac by sitting at it, you do not have a server.
  3. For access from outside the house, use a private network such as Tailscale rather than forwarding ports on the router.
  4. Give the Mac a fixed address, either a DHCP reservation on the router or a static IP.

Give it a display, even though it has none

A Mac with no monitor renders nothing, so Screen Sharing arrives blank or tiny. The three answers are a ten-dollar HDMI dummy plug, a hardware dongle, or a virtual display created in software. We compared them in the blank Screen Sharing page.

If you also want to sit down at the machine occasionally, an iPad on Sidecar gives you a real screen on demand and no permanent hardware.

Never sleep, always come back

Three settings decide whether the Mac is there when you need it: never sleep, start up again after a power failure, and wake for network access. All three live in Energy settings and none is on by default for a desktop Mac.

A small uninterruptible power supply turns a flaky socket into a non-event, and with restart-after-power-failure on, even a full outage only costs you a boot.

SideMini’s Server mode sets all three in one click with your password, and remembers the previous values so it can put them back.

The FileVault decision

A server has to reach a logged-in session by itself, and macOS will not log in automatically while FileVault is on. That is the trade-off, and it is not optional or clever to work around.

Keep FileVault if the Mac holds anything sensitive and accept typing a password at each cold boot. Turn it off with automatic login if the machine is a media box on your own network. Our FileVault and automatic login post lays out all three options.

Storage and backups

External SSDs over USB or Thunderbolt are the normal answer; internal upgrades are not practical on modern Mac minis. Format APFS unless something specifically needs otherwise.

Set Time Machine to a second drive and check a restore once. A home server accumulates the things nobody else has a copy of faster than you expect.

What to actually run

Plex or Jellyfin for media, Home Assistant in a container, a Git remote, backups for the household, and increasingly a local language model. The last one has its own guide: running Ollama on a Mac mini around the clock.

Prefer native apps over containers for anything that needs the GPU or the media engine; the virtualisation layer cannot reach them.

SideMini is the small menu bar app that makes your iPad the screen of a Mac mini and connects it at every boot. Try it free for three days; $9 once, no subscription.

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