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!

  • palitu@lemmy.perthchat.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Tired8281@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Docker is hurting my progress. I just can’t seem to wrap my head around it. Is there a Docker for Dummies?

    • BetterNotBigger@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • pontiffkitchen0@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Tired8281@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        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?

        • SkyNTP@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          I think the real benefits of Docker don’t become unquestionably obvious untill you’ve ever tried to manage more than one installation of some kind of server software in the same machine and inevitably learn the hard way that this comes with a lot of problems and downsides.

          • From simple things like if the environment needs a restart, you can just restart the container, without rebooting the machine, interrupting other applications.
          • To seriously dangerous and problematic things, like configuring your system to work with your new application only to realize that this configuration is breaking your other server software.
          • cwagner@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I always hated (and still hate) Docker. But I use Proxmox to manage several installations on a single machine (via LXC), and I absolutely love it. Everything you mention is an advantage of containers in general, but not at all Docker-specific.

          • Tired8281@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            1 year ago

            So far I’ve avoiding learning about Docker by just buying a new old end-of-life Chromebook when I wanted to run anything. Works pretty well, except for the giant pile of Chromebooks behind my TV.

            • Tayphix@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              I would really recommend just playing around with Docker until you understand it rather than buying old hardware for each service.

  • blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.ukEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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

  • burak@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Noob here in terms of self-hosting. How do you self-host multiple apps? Wouldn’t it get unmanageable at some point?

  • AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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?