I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of self-hosting modern web applications (if you look under the surface!)
Most modern web applications are designed to basically run standalone on a server. Integration into an existing environment a real challenge if not impossible. They often come with their own set of requirements and dependencies that don’t easily align with an established infrastructure.
“So you have an already running and fully configured web server? Too bad for you, bind me to port 443 or GTFO. Reverse-proxying by subdomain? Never heard of that. I won’t work. Deal with it. Oh, and your TLS certificates? Screw them, I ship my own!”
Attempting to merge everything together requires meticulous planning, extensive configuration, and often annoying development work and finding workarounds.
Modern web applications, with their elusive promises of flexibility and power, have instead become a source of maddening frustration when not being the only application that is served.
My frustration about this is real. Self-hosting modern web applications is an uphill battle, not only in terms of technology but also when it comes to setting up the hosting environment.
I just want to drop some PHP files into a directory and call it a day. A PHP interpreter and a simple HTTP server – that’s all I want to need for hosting my applications.
Sadly, a PHP dev environment and a webserver is not enough for modern devs.
I just ended up installing proxmox, and everything I install gets it’s own VM. It binds to the port it wants, and my public IP port 443 binds to a VM win ngnix. If you hit a subdomain, ngnix proxies the request to the actual server and port. Servers can ship whatever certificates they want, my ngnix is the one clients negociate SSL with, so it has its own certificate. The only other thing running on that server is certbot.
It’s honestly much simpler this way. Need to restart a machine after install? Everything stays up. One of the software needs glibc version fuck my ass? Don’t care that machine will have that version of glibc and I will not touch it. Software has a memory leak? Qemu doesn’t, and the VM is limited in ram so only that is crashing.
Just asked sure your VM template is good (and has your ssh key installed) and you’re golden. Before this week’s internet outage, I had 99.999% uptime with a single hypervisor, and the only monitoring I have is just uptime of all services as seen from AWS. I don’t even have alerts.
I sometimes long for the days (that I missed, I’m only 24) of monolithic Linux servers where you have a webserver, a database server and that’s it. Sadly, VMs are cheap and dependencies hell. It’s still quite fun to tinker in the virtualized world. It’s just not the same as what has been.