April 2025

Saving $20 a Year: Synology NAS Zotero Server!

As an academic, it should come as no surprise that I make liberal use of Zotero, the only viable open-source citation manager on the market. It’s also technically free – if you use 300mb of storage.

I have been using the first-tier of their paid plan which allows 2GB, which I naively thought would be plenty given I am just storing PDFs, how foolish I was. After going through multiple paper cullings over the years to avoid upgrading to the next tier of 6GB for $60/year – or tripling the cost for an embarrassingly small storage upgrade – I decided enough was enough. Can you imagine paying $60 for 6GB of storage any time after 2002?

I decided to make matters into my own hands.

How Can I Set This Up?

Oh yeah, I have my own server that I use to self-host and centralize my files plus a media server! A little write up on what I bought, how I set it up, and why I invested in this system here! As this guide is pretty specific to having the right hardware to self-host your Zotero library.

I mostly wanted to write this up to give more visibility to this article written by Ben Stolovitz. If it ever goes down, I will write up a recreation, but for now it’s basically all you need!

The only things that were unclear while setting up is that when you create setup port forwarding, just do “custom” and enter the port for both the local and router, so 5006 if you are enabling HTTPS access. When you are setting up the “zotero” folder, make sure to create the user profile beforehand. It just saves you coming back to the shared folder permissions and making it only accessible with the zotero-specific limited permission user profile you made. I was able to remove all access rights except the zotero folder and the WebDav application, and it worked just fine. Remember when you are providing the log-in info on the Zotero app that you are using the limited permission account and not your admin! If you are running into issues it’s probably because you didn’t notice that Zotero auto-appends “/zotero/” to the URL, so just make sure you have the correct full link!

If you setup the certificate, only use HTTPS (port 5006), create a limited permission user to interface with the server, then you should be pretty secure in setting this up!

Does It Work?

This is TBD! I will add to this section a few months down the line just in case I end up reverting and tearing the whole thing up, or decide on a different implementation!

Regardless, the point of this project is like any other I write about – make your life more secure, private, and under your ownership. While I trust Zotero way more than say Google Drive or Apple iCloud, there is always a level of risk for your security, privacy, and finances when you invest your most valuable possessions into someone else’s services.