A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I run unraid on my server box with a few 8tb hdd and nvme for cache. From there it is really easy to spin up Docker containers or stacks using compose, as well as VMs using your iso of choice.
For automation, I use Ansible to run one click setup machines; it is great for any cloud provider work too.
For a while I tried to run k8s (k3s mostly), then I did run nomad for a while. Now I am just running docker compose on Ubuntu (still have one box running Proxmox, but that will be decommissioned eventually, and mostly just runs one VM running Ubuntu).
I am building a few things to solve specific problems I have with this:
Most of my server hardware is oriented toward having a bunch of disks plugged into them (I am 100% guilty of being a data hoarder), and I am running gluster to glue that all together, so that is something I install onto the servers to share their physical disks and/or mount the logical disks.
I usually set up SSH keys and disable password login.
Then I git-pull my base docker-compose stack that sets up:
I have a handful of other docker-compose files that hook into that setup to make it easy to quickly deploy various services wherever in a modular way.
Probably the odd one here with Arch Linux + docker compose with still a lot of manual labor
updating it after maximum 4 weeks is enough, container more often
I run Debian + Docker, and use Portainer to manage the docker stacks
Cloud vps with debian. Then fix/update whatever weird or outdated image my vps provider gave me (over ssh). Then setup ssh certs instead of password. I use tmux a lot. Sometimes I have local scripts with scp to move some files around.
Usually I'm just hosting mosquitto, maybe apache2 webserver and WordPress or Flask. The latter two are only for development and get moved to other servers when done.
I don't usually use containers.
I'm better at hardware development than all this newfangled web stuff, so mostly just give me a command line without abstractions and I'm happy.
K
For years over done an Ubuntu LTS base with docker, but I've just recently started using debian base. Moved to debian for my workstation as well.
I'd like to use rootless podman, but since I include zerotier in my containers, they need access to the tunnel device and net_admin, so rootless isn't an option right now.
Podman-compose works for me. I'd like to learn how to use Ansible and Kubernetes, but right now, it's just my Lemmy VPS and my Raspberry Pi 4, so I don't have much need for automation at the moment. Maybe some day.
Super interesting to me that you switch between Debian and Ubuntu. Is there any rhyme or reason to when you use one over the other?
You can add net_admin to the user running podman, I have added it to the ambient capability mask before, which acts like an inherited override for everything the user runs.
I have a bunch of different stuff, a dedicated server with Debian, 4 raspberry Pis + 1 micro computer that acts as a LB/Router/DHCP/DNS for the Pis.
In general I would say that my logic is as follows:
apt install X and instead you might need to create a new playbook for it, but in the long term, it paid off multiple times. I do have some default playbook that does basic config (user, SSH key provisioning, some default packages) and hardening (SSH config, iptables).Sounds cool. ansible could never convince me, though, because playbook writing is so annoying.
Oh, I am there with you on that. I got used in my previous job, where everything was done with Ansible, but I still find myself copy pasting and changing most of the times. I actually like way more a declarative approach a-la-terraform.
Overall though there is a lot of community material, and once the playbooks are written it's quite good!
For me it’s Ubuntu Server as the OS base, swag as reverse proxy and docker-compose for the services. So mostly SSH and yolo but with containers. I’d guess having something like Portainer running would probably be useful, but for me the terminal was enough.
As folder structure I just have a services directory with subfolders for each app/service.
I have a stupid overcomplicated networking script that never works. So every time i set up a new server I need to fix a myriad of weird issues I've never seen before. Usually I setup a server with a keyboard and mouse because SSH needs networking, if it's a cloud machine its the QEMU console or hundreds of reboots.
A series of VPSes running AlmaLinux, I have a relatively big Ansible playbook to setup everything after the server goes online. The idea is that I can at any time scrape the server off, install an OS, put in all the persistent data (Docker volumes and /srv partition with all the heavy data), and run a playbok.
Docker Compose for services, last time I checked Podman, podman-compose didn't work properly, and learning a new orchestration tool would take an unjustifiable amount of time.
I try to avoid shell scripts as much as possible because they are hard to write in such a way so that they handle all possible scenarios, they are difficult to debug, and they can make a mess when not done properly. Premade scripts are usually the big offenders here, and they are I nice way to leave you without a single clue how the stuff they set up works.
I don't have a selfhosting addiction.
Kubernetes.
I deploy all of my container/Kubernetes definitions from Github:
I've recently switched my entire self hosted infrastructure to NixOS, but only after a few years of evaluation, because it's quite a paradigm shift but well worth it imho.
Before that I used to stick to a solid base of Debian with some docker containers. There are still a few of those remaining that I have yet to migrate to my NixOS infra (namely mosquitto, gotify, nodered and portainer for managing them).