Selfhosted @lemmy.world BetterNotBigger @lemmy.world 2y ago

It's a really fun time to self-host today

I've never had so much fun self-hosting. A decade or so ago I was hosting things on Linode and running all kinds of servers for myself but with the rise of cloud services, I favored just giving everything to Google. I noticed how popular this community was on Reddit/Lemmy and now it's my new addiction.

I'm a software engineer and have plenty of experience deploying to AWS/GCP so my head has been buried in the sand with these cloud providers. Now that I'm looking around there are things like NextCloud, Pihole, and Portainer all set up with Cloudflare Zero Trust... I feel like I'm living the dream of having the convenience to deploy my own services with proper authentication and it's so much fun.

Reviving old hardware to act as local infra is so badass it feels great turning on old machines that were collecting dust. I'm now trying to convince my brother to participate in doing hard-drive swaps on a monthly basis so I have some backup redundancy off-site without needing to back up to the cloud.

Sorry if this feels ranty but I just can't get over how awesome this is and I feel like a kid again. Cheers to this awesome community!

EDIT: Just also found Fission and OpenFaaS, selfhosted serverless functions, I'm jumping with joy right now!

34 comments

Yea between the enshitificaiton of the internet and how far selfhost software has come it is a great time to selfhost and will just keep getting better.

Selfhosting, reddit drama, kbin, all this just makes it seem like the internet is having a sort of grassroots, back to basics movement which I'm all for lol.
Saw this post on “All”. Last I checked (sometime in 2019), self-hosting was a fairly involved process.

Has the process simplified enough for a complete beginner like me to begin self-hosting services on, say, a raspberry pi?

If yes, can you please point me to a good resource/wiki?
- Follow docker install guide for raspi
  
  Browse awesome-selfhosted and find services that seem interesting to you or ask for recs here.
  
  Follow the projects guide to do a docker install
  
  (Bonus) Setup a reverse proxy like nginx proxy manager so you can access your services with urls
  
  (Bonus) Setup domain and a service such as Tailscale so you can access your services safely from outside your home.
  
  Thanks for the steps!
  
  I remember steps 4 & 5 were the ones that made me drop the idea. It involved a lot of configuration.
  
  I will take a look once again, hopefully these have become simple enough.
  
  Honestly I've never used docker properly and one time I tried for the *arr stack I ran into many issues with access to storage drives and connectivity between different services. Does it actually help with anything on rpi? I thought it's good enough to just install the rpi OS and then install other services normally on it?
- Actually, I would argue the simplest way to self host today is TrueCharts.
  
  The problem is when it breaks, you are SOL because you didn't build it yourself so you got no clue how it works
And it can get really low effort too.

I do very little maintenance as I just don't have time at the moment. Everything just runs.

I love paperless, immich and meanie as my top apps, with nginx proxy manager dealing with the proxying.
Absolutely! I've been enjoying it a lot too. Hosting Mastodon, Matrix, kbin, and a couple of game servers now from my basement 🙂
Docker is hurting my progress. I just can't seem to wrap my head around it. Is there a Docker for Dummies?
- Is there a specific part that you’re having trouble with? Is it more how it works under the hood, or more about using it to spin up containers? I can try to answer any questions and post some how tos for you.
  
  I think I just need a general overview. Something about the concept isn't clicking for me, and it makes it hard for me to learn how to use it when I fundamentally don't get it. Is there a really good "Introduction to Docker and the tools people use with it" that I haven't found?
- I learned the basics of docker by using synology and unraid. They make it really easy setting up docker apps.
- Are you having trouble learning it or understanding what it's used for? Much of learning Docker also comes with understanding some basics of software deployment like environment variables, ports and volumes. Happy to help answer any questions because it's an extremely powerful tool once it starts clicking.
If you want to host things and be accessible from outside your home then I'd start with getting a domain and static IP, point the DNS at your IP, make sure your DNS provider is supported by Let's Encrypt DNS authentication.

Then setup nginx as a reverse proxy and get Let's Encrypt setup with auto renewal. That way you can have secure https connections to your home.

Then install docker compose, fire up a service and configure nginx to proxy to it
- I usually cut down on domain/DNS cost by using a free dynamic DNS service called duckdns. It works super well, provides Let's Encrypt support and sub-sub-domains. (for example your could have https://git.$username.duckdns.org)
  
  I've found as a IT noob that Caddy 2 provides as much "batteries inside" and "boiler-plate free" to support me, because I have no Idea what I'm doing. So I just let caddy handle my encryption and reverse proxy to my actual server.
  
  I'm an embedded software dev, who only discovers ethernet protocols on a surface level, because we hadn't need it yet in previous projects, so I'm a bit lost on how to do cloud stuff. So having all these great tools for free for me to try out and connect from outside to my media servers and stuff is awesome!
  
  My old cheap Asus N66u router has a free dyndns service built-in. Super easy to setup. I use it to host a jellyfin setup. Bout to setup a torrent server and a NextCloud server. Used to run a owncloud server a few years back and loved having it.
- https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/swag is a nice image that gets you an nginx reverse proxy and Let's Encrypt automatic cert creation/renewal set up out of the box, with a bunch of sample configs for popular self-hosted services.
Glasfiber home internet has also really improved the available upload speed, which is great for self-hosters.
Noob here in terms of self-hosting. How do you self-host multiple apps? Wouldn't it get unmanageable at some point?
- Docker as the most popular/common approach (due to its incredible control). And you can name the containers (where the "apps" are) to whatever you want and its really easy to list em (takes only one command to do that -- docker ps), making it easy and simple to manage all your stuff. Then again, theres always Portainer if you want a more "clicky-clicky" approach.
- Yeah, if you hosted them all as installed services then it would be pretty hard to manage, but if you're running them as containers and have some management software its easy. I have a very simple setup with portainer and docker-compose and it's no problem for me to manage about 10 services. I don't think I'll be adding more in the near future, but even if I would, it still wouldn't be a problem.

34 comments