Self-hosting

I am not a software guru, so I cannot set up a lot of these self-hosted programs by myself. So these services that allow simple old me to selfhost programs have been a blessing. I have tried out yunohost and CasaOS, and I'm going to try out Freedombox shortly after writing this because it caught my interest when I looked it up.

I have used Yunohost for years now. By my count, I have installed and tested 47 programs with yunohost. Many of them were to test which I wanted for a specified purpose (miniflux vs selfoss for rss, lychee vs photoprism for pictures, etc). Without yunohost, these programs would have been inaccessible to me. And in the process, I have learned a few things about yunohost. Most programs install to subdomains so you have have a number of programs installed on the same system, but some programs MUST be installed to the main domain. And I never could get those to install if I already had programs installed to subdomains. Those programs would need to be installed first, THEN you could install the rest after it got its main domain spot. Not easy to to figure out unless you know that ahead of time. Also, if two programs you need both require the main domain, you can only have one; that is, unless you set up a second domain in yunohost. Then you could install both as the main in each domain. I haven't tried that, but I have tried moving installed programs from one domain to a different one and everything worked well. I have upgraded yunohost to new versions and things worked well, and I have upgraded the programs and that also worked smoothly; EXCEPT for one time with nextcloud. Several years ago, the nextcloud upgrade broke something about the database and I had to reinstall it. But I've also used TrueNAS on an old computer and installed nextcloud with it before and it also broke nextcloud, so that seems to be something I have to worry about with that specific program... Anyway, I love yunohost and would recommend it.

I actually tried out CasaOS this year. I've heard a lot about docker and CasaOS and figured I'd play with it and see how it is. It worked well when I installed my programs on it. It doesn't have as large a list as yunohost, but the ones it had worked well. My hope was that since it used docker, I could install other programs packed with docker on it as well, which would ovecome the smaller store. So I went to the miniflux website and found their docker-compose instructions and tried to use that to install it with CasaOS. It failed. Since I am not a docker person, I couldn't tell you why it failed; it was likely my fault but that doesn't matter to me because it means that couldn't easily install other programs outside the store with CasaOS. And if that's the case, I'd rather stick with yunohost, which was lighter on resource use and has worked well for me. Because of the bigger store, yunohost allows me to test a much wider variety of programs, which I appreciate. If you know what you want to host and it is in CasaOS, or you know more about docker than me, then CasaOS was a fine system. I just prefer yunohost.

I have heard of freedombox and looked at it YEARS ago, but it had very few programs I was interested in. However, I took a look at its website when I read this post and it has piqued my interest. Based of the programs in its catalogue, it seems to curate the resource-lite programs into it (I see miniflux rather than the heavier, flashier selfoss; zoph rather than immich;shaarli rather than linkwarden or readeck). That really fits with the programs I want to use so I decided to install it in a virtual machine to try it out. First, it seems that some of the programs I wanted to try (miniflux) were on their website, but not available in the system. I looked into it and it seems they have 2 setups: debian stable, and debian testing. A number of their programs are ready in testing, and will available in the next stable release this year. Ironically, the programs I wanted to try were in testing: featherwiki, miniflux, nextcloud, and tiddlywiki. So I tried to upgrade to debian testing but failed. Freedombox asked a lot of networking questions during install, so maybe there is more to upgrading now than just changing the apt sources file. No problem, i just started a new virtual machine with debian testing and installed freedombox again. I have to say, the install, the networking questions, and the Next Steps messages were all top notch. I wouldn't know how to set up a lot of that, but with the guided questions, it set it up and it works. The service has 2 main views: apps and system. the system view is well laid out and seems straightforward. Miniflux installed without issue and works.

Hilariously, nextcloud installed but when I tried to use it it told me "Access through untrusted domain." Their page does state "Nextcloud is considered experimental in FreedomBox having to do with the integration of the Nextcloud container in the FreedomBox system." and "Please note that Nextcloud is installed and run inside a container provided by the Nextcloud community" so it certainly is still considered unfinished (thus being only in debian testing). I found in the documentation that is is a podman container and that until last spring it was not even accessible to install until more testing was done. So I may have just chosen the one program that hasn't been ironed out yet. However, in poking around, I did see that the nextcloud page on my freedombox had options to run diagnostics, rerun setup, backup, restore, and uninstall. All of those are appreciated, but didn't help my current issue. I don't know how to enter podman or docker containers, so I'm stuck at the moment, but I'm on irc to see if freedombox devs/users can help me sort this out. While I did encounter a failure here, I was using a testing branch so that comes with the territory.

I am actually VERY impressed with this project and will keep trying it out. I don't know if it will replace yunohost for my actual, used selfhost projects, but yunohost will always have a place for me in testing new programs :)