Grammar and spelling check in my homelab with LanguageTool

😬 I’m sure you know this: you send an email, feel good about it… and then spot a typo AFTER you hit Send 📧😅

Nothing dramatic — just annoying enough to stick in your head 🤦‍♂️

I tried a few tools, and what stuck with me was LanguageTool 🛠️

It’s not just a spell checker. It catches grammar, style, and context issues across 20+ languages 🌍 — which is useful when switching between German 🇩🇪 and English 🇬🇧 all day.

What really sold me, though: 👉 LanguageTool’s core is open source (LGPL 2.1+) 🔓 Therefore you can run your own server instead of sending emails to a third-party service 🔒

With a small Docker setup 🐳, it’s easy to deploy and integrate via the HTTP API. The browser extension integrates directly into Gmail, Outlook Web (OWA), LinkedIn, and many other — so proofreading happens where you write, not in a separate tool.

For me, it nicely solves a very practical problem:✨ cleaner text without giving up control over my data.