I’ve been following this community for some time in order to learn about self-hosting and, while I have learnt about a bunch of cool web services to host, I’m still lost on where/how to start. Does anyone have, like, a very beginner guide that is not just “install this distro and click these buttons”? I have an old laptop that runs Arch (btw), but I’m not familiar with networking at all. So anything starting from “you can check your IP address using ip a” would be appreciated.
More specifically, I have a domain that I want to point to an old laptop of mine (I intend to switch to a VPS if/when I feel like the laptop is starting to lose it). How do I expose my laptop to the internet for this to work (ideally without touching my router, because I’ll be traveling quite a bit with my laptop and don’t mind the occasional downtime). I assume that once I’m able to type my domain name on my mobile and see it open anything from my laptop, I can then setup all the services I want via nginx, but that’s step 2. I tried to follow a few online guides but, like I mentioned, they’re either too simplistic (no I don’t want to move to Ubuntu Server just for this) or too complex (no I don’t know how DHCP works).
Thanks in advance
Start with Docker/Containers.
Once you understand the basics of it you can start selfhosting all sorts of applications from/on your laptop with very little effort. For Docker Command Line Basics there are tons of free tutorials online. If that’s to big of a step in the beginning, start with a Portainer (spinning it up is basically just copy and paste one little command) the rest can be done from the GUI. Docker will also help you to figure out what you might think is worth „selfhosting“ for yourself. Because selfhosting is almost like clothing: Everyone has their own taste and style.
Wait, does Docker work without me setting me the IP address and all that stuff too? Coz that’s the stuff I’m more confused about. At least in my head, setting up docker is just launching the service and, optionally, setting reverse proxy. But wouldn’t that work solely on my own device instead of the internet?
Yes it is that simple. In the beginning you can reach your services via localhost or simply the IP address of your laptop (followed by the specific port).
Understood. Guess I’ll figure out setting up all the services before I get to figuring out putting them beyond my local network. Thanks!
This is the way! Don’t worry about vpn, proxies and tunneling before you know where you’re heading.