Hey guys simple question: Do you use self hosting solutions like CasaOS or Yunohost? Why or why don’t you?
This is more of a out of curiousity question since I am currently experimenting with different setups. ATM I prefer self hosting solutions because of the easiness of adding services.
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I find they tend to make things more difficult, because as soon as you want to do anything outside of the nice box they give you, it’s much harder than doing it on a regular setup.
Plus these days basically every application has a docker image, and deploying with docker compose is really easy and quick.
I do use Proxmox and Portainer though, since they are mostly just sitting on top of standard systems.
To give you an idea of what you’ll experience in your self-hosting journey: adding services is the easy part, maintaining a system in production over many years is the hard part. And the self hosting solutions you mean are quite bad at that. Eventually I ditched even Proxmox because its updates are cumbersome and you never know wheter you’ll end up with a working system after the upgrade.
Ultimately, you want to avoid any complex transitions in your system altogether. Decouple everything, make everything disposable, especially your OS. The ootb-selfhosting-solutions are the antithesis of that: lots of hidden magic behind colorful buttons, which makes it immensely hard to get a working setup the second something goes wrong. And that will inevitably happen with time passing.
Well, managing servers is part of my job. So stuff like what you mention doesn’t really make it easier for me and it adds unnecessary overhead.
I’m a tinkering nerd, so I like to have a headless Linux box.
I did use self hosting operating systems in the beginning, and they’re nice. However, when I tried just a plain Ubuntu headless install, I felt way more accomplished after getting everything working.
Yeah I started with a headless Ubuntu server and it was real nice. I’m finally ready to leave Ubuntu though and want to switch to a headless NixOS server.
Nixos! Nixos! Nixos!
Exactly this, nothing against tools like these, but I’m in it for the learning so I want to get as DIY as possible.
And yeah, it’s super satisfying to see it all come together.
No, maybe use them as a toy for app discovery, but otherwise when those projects get eventually abandoned, then it’s a mess to move out
Plus they always try to hide how stuff works behind the scenes so that day that upgrade script has a bug and fails, it’s hard to revert to a working stage.
It’s like trying to get in the classic car business without any mechanical knowledge.
That 1950s Ford was working great when you bought it, but if you have no idea how it works, you need to pay hundreds to fix it. Except here it’s difficult to find someone that can drop in and fix your automated self hosted setup, even for money
Plus they always try to hide how stuff works behind the scenes so that day that upgrade script has a bug and fails, it’s hard to revert to a working stage.
Yunohost is creating backups for apps that are being updated. If update fails, it automatically reverts. Yes, it works, I checked.
those projects get eventually abandoned,
Yunohost is here for years now, and it does not look like it will be abondoned any time soon.
Plain old Debian on the hardware with all services living in LXC containers. LXC containers are like working with VMs or ‘real’ machines so I only needed to learn about 3 more commands to get new services running, the rest is regular old Linux.
I’ve used OpenMediaVault in the past and it is great, especially for new users, but I just prefer a bare-bones solution.
I use Cosmos Cloud because it makes managing my containers and hosting them a lot easier. It includes a reverse proxy (with anti ddos and anti bot), an OIDC server, a container manager (lets you import docker composes too), easy container deploy through app store, multiple users, and more. It’s also supposed to come out with a few features that let you connect through a VPN (so your services are not directly exposed) and set up cgnat bypass / hide your ip.
I use Debian for my self host stuff, I did start out with Mandrake and webmin. but after wanting to customise some config, I moved to deb
I also ended up on Debian. Started on Redhat, then moved through a few much smaller distros. Used Ubuntu for awhile until their “security” update broke the networking on all my servers in one night. Amazingly the fix for that problem was to follow their own directions to recompile the kernel with their config files, but the problem persisted in all their releases for at least a decade (judging by the frequent replies to the bug thread that I kept receiving). I completely gave up on them at that point and switched to Debian, and I’ve never once regretted that choice.
I didn’t even know this type of this existed until somewhat recently. I usually write my own systemd files to host containers with podman and manage them with systemd.
Just docker and some scripts. I used unraid for a bit but it annoyed me.
So what you’re asking is “y u no host Yunohost”?
Unraid works well for me, everything is in docker containers, and I imagine I could move them elsewhere if needed. But over the past few years that’s not been necessary.
I usually use Debian with a docker-compose.yml file for most things. If there’s a Debian package for some software, I prefer that over using Docker.
Having said that, I’ve just built a new home server and am using Unraid on it. Its Docker UI is pretty nice.
I only use industrial solutions: Kubernetes, Ansible and Docker. My infrastructure is like my source code: versioned in git, maintainable, testable and repeatable.
Nixos, i’m using nixos
It will take anyone time to learn how to use it. But this thing is marvelous
It’s not a “self hosting solution”, but it’s an is where you already have all the stuff you need It’s like an is which is docker, and you just write everything in a docker-compose
