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!
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.
I set up wireguard vpn and took down all my reverse proxies as it feels more secure and is easier to maintain.
From what I’ve heard tailscale is a step easier as well. So you could vpn into your network rather than accessing the services via URL.
Yep, good point!
And yes Tailscale is super simple and beginner friendly, it literally installs and is ready to use in seconds.
Np, I would say dm me if you have any questions but I dunno if you can message between lemmy and kbin haha
Thanks for the support. :-)
Will surely DM you or create a post here if I am lost during the setup process.
Getting a domain is sounds more scary then it really is. In reality you fork over some small amount of cash to a company (like cloudflare, AWS, etc) and they give you a domain.
For the reverse proxy, 95% of the time it’s a basic set of files you drop into the correct folders (or pass into your container if using a containerized solution). The other 5% of the time the final app require something slightly less cut and dry (but generally still understood).
If you need help/want some pointers dm me and I can get you going in the right direction.
Thank you so much, I will keep this in mind when I start tinkering next weekend. In the meantime, I will search for my old Pi 3. :-)
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?
Nope, do whatever suits you!
I would say tho the example you made is one of the infamous cases where docker is more difficult to setup than without due to the file locations of your movies, etc needing to match between dockers. When I set it up I found a really good guide that not only explained how to set it up but they also explained the logic and reason behind the issue.
https://wiki.servarr.com/docker-guide#consistent-and-well-planned-paths
Another good guide about the issue:
https://trash-guides.info/Hardlinks/How-to-setup-for/Docker/
The reason I’d initially recommend docker to a beginner is it keeps everything clean and organized, it’s easy to undo mistakes while learning, and I feel some apps are easier to setup with docker because they come with the dependencies already installed and configured properly.
If I were to setup docker the way the guide explains it, could I then just backup that and reuse it every time I wanted to refresh my *arr stack installation and configuration? Can I make it first on PC and then transfer to rpi, would that be “in the spirit” of docker? In my head they are always black boxes that should work regardless of their environment but it never turned out to be like that in practice when I’d try actually using them, so I’m still not sure of the use case 😄. I get it it’s useful when you have to deploy to many different hardware configurations in prod but that’s not an issue with self hosting at home?