I prefer self hosted FOSS software for the simple reason that it's so much easier to learn how to get them to do tricks. I can install, uninstall, reinstall, hack, patch, and demolish them over and over again, learning a power of stuff each time, and then I can carry that knowledge and power with me for all future endeavors.
This seems absolutely vital to me from a pedagogical point of view, but people almost never talk about it, as if admitting breaking things you can instantly recreate to learn more about them is somehow an admission of shame, around your failure to understand them sight unseen.
I guess it might depend on skill set, but I disagree. I have so many less headaches & problems with self hosted FOSS solutions. No rug pulls with subscriptions or just outright killing a product by surprise, total control of the data & server, everything is in my hands which makes it much easier to keep operational however long I want.
How much I've learned by self-hosting the software that I use on a daily basis is what has made the experience compelling. As you point out, it is knowledge that compounds and I've reaped the benefits on my professional endeavors.
I can’t stress enough how important deliberate practice is.
In all environments where i had some learning/testing/staging environment i just thrived.
I’ve had a couple of jobs so far where you can do all the learning you want, in prod, and of you break something it’s your fault. They’re awful, and are those kind of job where the only people thriving are those who have been there long enough to know where all (or almost all) the sharp edges are.
> How can I add my project to the list?
> Feel free to reach out and share the details of your project with me.
> Note that I will not manually intervene with the order in which your project is displayed. The current sort options (repository stars, last activity, alphabetical) are an objective method for displaying projects without personal bias.
How did we even manage before things like GitHub existed? I love living in a world where if I can think of it, someone has already done it and it exists as code for free!
So, this is an awkward question to ask (coming from the Windows side of things).
I see all these self hosted projects, think "neat!", then want to spin them up and immediately get a little lost because I honestly haven't really touched Docker.
If I want to set up something from nothing (eg, I'm spinning up a VM for the first time on some ESXi metal to run something), what do I start with as a base OS these days to "just run Docker" without much else?
I know I'm kind of going slightly against the model of Docker here, but when you also don't have anything at all to base from...
Debian is a popular choice, as is Ubuntu Server LTS. I've chosen Ubuntu Server LTS as my base. It's a nice compromise between the rock solid stability of Debian, whilst allowing for some more recent sofftware package releases in the repositories.
> whilst allowing for some more recent sofftware package releases in the repositories
That really depends on how the Debian and Ubuntu releases line up.
A lot of the packages in Debian 12 are more current than 22.04, because Debian 12 was released in 2023. That will change this month, because Ubuntu's newest LTS will be from this month.
Debian stable isn't as old on release as it used to be.
I have some ansible playbooks for setting up my "standards" on new machines. The very first playbook that runs, first step, checks for os_family = "Ubuntu" and runs the snap remove & purge command!
I had to drop ubuntu because of their stance of having unattended upgrades enabled by default, this in turns translates to ansible failing every time when I first run it on a brand new server, because the first thing it does is installing updates.
It's frustrating that the unattended upgrades apply to every package, but luckily you can blacklist things that cause problems. I've had problems with NVidia tools being upgraded before the driver is (since I rarely restart), and don't like upgrades that require restarts, so I do this first thing:
That's fine on a desktop machine, the problem on a server machine is that as soon as I start the server, I will probably be in automation mode and I definitely need to run `apt` for some reason. But APT is unavailable, so everything is blocked until unattended upgrades are done. So much for being "unattended", I have to attend to start the next script.
I'm not sure what are you asking, is the question "what do I need on a fresh system to start running containers"? In which case all you need is to install the docker packages from the repositories in the distro of your choice (Debian Stable is a good starter for servers). Or are you asking what do you base your docker container on?
So as of the Broadcom acquisition, ESXi is no longer the recommended route for anything, but especially not personal self hosted projects.
Instead, proxmox is a good, free, open source hypervisor alternative. One nice thing about it is that because it’s really linux under the hood, you can just directly host docker containers in proxmox. I would say that is the recommended route if you have a spare machine available.
If you don't have a spare machine available and want to host on your machine, then you can use docker on Windows with WSL, or you can create a Ubuntu VM, and use that. If you have no linux experience I’d recommend going the Ubuntu desktop route for a VM. While Ubuntu server is lightweight, it’s also a huge learning curve going from a full service GUI to foreign CLI-only OS, that has many fewer guardrails.
> Instead, proxmox is a good, free, open source hypervisor alternative.
I got the impression from all their "enterprise" branding that it wasn't, however based your claim I went digging and found that it's AGPLv3 and they do have a CLA but they allege the submitter retains the copyright, which my IANAL interpretation should(!) prevent rug pulls
I don't use Windows, so this answer is coming from the total other end of the spectrum from you and I have never done this, but it seems like running those linux docker containers in Windows and not inside a VM that you have to manage is your best option. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscont...
I argued in https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/the-unreasona... that the way to go in this situation is to spin up a Debian VM in Virtualbox with Vagrant, and take it from there. Start by learning to install Docker from within the Debian VM, then the world is your oyster!
Install something like proxmox and then if you need some docker you can devote a few containers.
Yes that can mean vm inside of VMs, but home labs rarely do anything that performance demanding that this is an issue.
Something like proxmox will make so much of it point and click, it nearly can do everything needed out of the box (including backups, mirroring), if you prefer to start that way and it’s easy to set and forget. Lots of videos on YouTube too.
who all have different series on this and related topics.
Basically you burn the proxmox iso onto USB, plug it in, install it on the computer and its ready to go (obviously watch a few videos!). You need to access Proxmox from another computer on the same network through the IP address you get at the end of install. So if your router/gateway is say 198.168.0.1 you might set Proxmox as 198.168.0.99. Im still figuring the best practices on this out as obviously security is a major factor...
Which worked for me but its actually more convenient to use another comp as you want to be using your normal environment to use the services.
Once its up you browse to it, sign in and its ready to go. I got started by setting up plex by using this site:
https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/
which gives you a single command to run an install script of whatever you want to install. It will install it as a LXC Container which is like Docker but less overhead.
Or you can create VMs and run docker in them. This is next weeks job for me.
Each container gets created as a new service with its own IP address on the network. To expose them externally creates security risks if you don't know what you are doing. So I chose to use Cloudflare Tunnels which was super easy but I use CF daily. Now i have a working Plex server at plex.<mydomain>.com and a Mattermost server at chat.<mydomain>.com !
Its super fun and you just nuke stuff if it doesnt work. Proxmox UI is easy to understand. My biggest issue was understanding how to connect external drives and share them with the containers permanently. So understanding mounting drives, permissions in linux in general and then in Proxmox
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Linux_Container#_bind_mount_poi...
I have a massive amount to learn before I feel comfortable and secure. But totally worth the time spent so far and not as hard as expected once I decided to go down the Proxmox direction.
None of these lists ever seem to be as fleshed out, up to date, or well organized as https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted , though imo any more attention on the self hosted scene is awesome. We're now self hosting everything at my co-op, and it's a dream. Saves us money, provides learning opportunities, potentially is getting us work (managed hosting providers asking if we can be a devshop for their clients, for example), and lets us give back to the FOSS community as we uncover bugs.
We use:
* Matrix / Synapse for comms (slack alternative) (managed hosting through etke.cc)
* OpenProject for project management (linear alternative) (deployed on VPS so we can shim their premium token check)
* Kimai for time tracking and invoice generating (VPS)
* Crater for financial tracking (VPS)
* Outline for wiki (we tried bookstack and it was just too weird) (VPS)
* Vaultwarden for password management ("managed" hosting through elestio)
* EspoCRM for CRM and as a CMS for marketing sites for our members (VPS)
* Coolify as a PaaS (heroku / vercel alternative) (VPS) <- my favorite recent addition, lets any member just chuck projects up with whatever resources they need super easily, for "free" (we have a fatass VPS we got on sale from racknerd)
We usually deploy via docker containers and manage all our various VPS and containers with portainer.
I have a member that keeps pestering us to self-host emails as well but google already has us by the shorthairs with us on Migadu: clients often tell us our emails go to spam. Not much we can do about it we have like 50 email handles and no budget (yet) to give google the new price per email they're charging.
Adding members to the co-op for now has basically 0 onboarding cost because all revenue is through subcontracting, so, some members are revenue driving (because they're working a gig) and others aren't so they cost us nothing but also aren't earning anything. A lot of people joined regardless because working on stuff as a group is usually more impressive than what one can accomplish individually. For example we have a relatively junior member that's basically obsessed with DevOps and site reliability, but they don't get have application development experience so they have nothing "real" to deploy and manage. But with us they got to set up a really cool portainer setup and got us all routed through cloudflare, monitoring setup, etc, for a bunch of very real services that about 50 people use every day.
In terms of developing experience that's basically one half of our reason for existing: a good environment for career and personal growth. We try to make it as easy as possible to pick up new skills or further develop along existing skillsets. So I'd say it's very easy for members to develop the skillset necessary, if they have interest, because everything is transparent, we work hard to write good docs, and anyone can ask anyone else anything and get knowledgeable answers.
That is an excellent and comprehensive list, but is it targeted at individuals or organizations? Every area lists dozens of projects with a short description but no ranking, comparisons, skill-set required, or editorial recommendations.
Personally I rely on resources like https://alternativeto.net or "best of" lists to pick a couple options to evaluate in more depth. If I analyzed 10 times as many options I might discover really wonderful projects I would have otherwise missed, but I struggle to imagine having that kind of time.
In my frustration with MS Office, I gave it a chance and searched for MS Office alternatives ... and found https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad ! Looks quite nice. Maybe I should set that up on a server.
I have it! Trivial to setup too since it uses the FS as db.
The big downside is that is very privacy focused, so to invite a person to collaborate you have to do a whole bunch of things that non-tech-savvy wouldn't do.
You got me interested and I've tried it now. I've tried sharing a document and it just gave me a sharable link - doesn't sound too hard (it's not revocable because the URL contains a key, I guess, but that's a technical problem, not something non-technical person has to do)
That's the approach I used, but I wanted a document I could collaborate on and without having the risk of leaking it on the internet. In GDrive it's as simple as share -> specify email address.
In cryptpad you have to share your profile, the person has to "add you to their contacts" from your profile page, then they will appean in your contacts and you can add them as collaborators.
The reverse is also an option: ask them to share their profile link, then you can add them. Unfortunately non-tech person don't even understand where their profile link is.
There is also a concept of "team drive", which is cool, a bit rough around the edges. In that case you can send invites to people and they can join and share a single directory, which is great.
Have we gone full circle but made it more complicated?
Installing programs locally
Installing programs locally that need network access
Using web versions of those apps
Installing docker to run the web apps but locally.
Certainly some of these work fine to run as on-demand programs instead of services for many use cases (e.g. jekyll, rclone). I would say there are a wide variety of use cases that could have some of these running as a service on a laptop or workstation when it happens to be up, but doesn't need to be particularly high availability, too.
I make self-hosted software and haven't yet created a Docker image for it, but some people do want it. I also think it's useful, especially if you want to run multiple apps on the same server while having each app mostly isolated for security/privacy/performance reasons.
I think a good self-hosted app should provide numerous ways of installing it (Docker, bash install script, tutorial for manual installation, etc.).
Reminder of one of the risks of self-hosting: maintainability of things when you're not around. Do you have a 'continuity plan' for someone else to run things if you're hosting for people in addition to yourself?
Unless your friends/family have access to someone else as technical as you, things may start breaking. There was a story/discussion on this recently on HN, "Dad died in 2022. Since 2023, things he selfhosted have slowly begun breaking":
Certainly there are risks for cloud-based services (expiring credit card), but if you set aside your credentials in a safe place (e.g., paper envelope) then most folks can probably keep things going around if you're not around.
> maintainability of things when you're not around
The real issue, which is only getting worse.
The guy from Reddit says: “The operating system of either server. They're probably Macs, but more than that I don't know ... EDIT: Based on comments, probably Linux”.
? And that's the very basics. Modern apps tend to get “fancier” each year and the underlying stack of technologies, programming languages, and dependencies grows beyond reasonable.
E.g. one can probably find a Linux admin, a PHP or Python developer within their circle, but something beyond that is way less common. So the options are either hiring some stranger or ditching the setup (and data) entirely.
Being an enthusiast, who highly supports decentralization movement, would like to post just one suggestion while the project is new and the list of apps isn't huge:
I believe it would be to good to have some indication of each app's system requirements and what software stack it requires. Maybe as a filters.
Unfortunately, these days some apps require a rather ludicrous software environment with a DARPA-comparable computing power.
Writing this from my recent experience: I was using Mailcow few years ago. Recently decided to get back to it. Went to the official site aaannnd...
“6 GiB RAM + 1 GiB swap are fine for most private installations, while 8 GiB RAM are recommended for ~5 to 10 users.
A company with 15 phones (EAS enabled) and about 50 concurrent IMAP connections should plan 16 GiB RAM.”
Just in case, Mailcow is a mail server, which has recently became a “suite”.
Is it only with free/open-source self-hosted software?
Many times I am looking for premium self-hosted alternatives that are of good quality. I would rather pay for a self-hosted license knowing that I get support and that the software is maintained than spending the time to self-host something that might not work as expected.
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