Self-Hosted Main

Because most people who develop these things are, frankly, terrible at good documentation, or understanding the end-user perspective.

There's also a downward spiral effect when you start getting into these things, because lots of them require dependencies, or ask you to do things but don't explain why, and you're just left wondering why you added that line to a config file somewhere, but if you don't put it there, nothing works.

A vertical slice of the amount of knowledge you need passes through so many different disciplines, operating systems, GUIs, and programming languages that it would look like a Milhojas cake.

I've been a technical writer in the software industry for 17 years. The number one challenge in my work is extracting all of the information I need to write good documentation from the experts elsewhere in my company.

You're kidding?

I'm an avid home-labber trying to get into software engineering and I'm finding the software dev work to be super daunting lol

I can setup a reverse proxy in my sleep - but write a JS function without double checking google? forget it!

You don't have to do it, 99.9999%^([citation needed]) of the population don't. If it doesn't interest or excite you then it's not worth it.

Maybe you should read the documentation for the programs you try to install

I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.

This is big part of why I, even as an IT professional, don't do much homelabbing or selfhosting. So often I'll be scrolling through these subs and see something someone has done and I'll decide I want to do that too, but so often I end up abandoning whatever it is because doing x requires googling for y and z because without y and z, x doesn't work. And after a day of dealing with issues and tinkering on work stuff, do I want to spend more time troubleshooting? Often not.

Part of working with tech is knowing what to search for und using the right keywords. If you could give an example what guide / information you are unable to find, someone could give you an example how to search for it. I personally know a few junior devs and junior devops which use llama2 / chatgpt since they dont know how to search for it or read the docs.

Check YouTube. I haven’t found a lot of written out guides but someone has made a video on it, I bet. Christian Lempa, Techno Tim, Db Tech, NetworkChuck come to mind for self hosting tutorials on containers and new applications. I’m sure there’s a lot more as well.

Each one of these things is a separate topic/project. There is of course, overlap, but concentrate on just one at a time. If you try to do everything, you'll go mad. Application Administrator, Network Engineer, Sysadmin, Network Security, are often separate full time jobs. Just concentrate on your own needs, one at a time, then focus on how simple you can pare down that one thing you need/want to self host. What is the minimum set of capabilities you must have for this one thing? Then, expect to have as much research for this one thing as taking a 1 credit college course, at least. Maybe more, maybe less, depending what it is. That's a more realistic set of expectations.

I've done a lot of web design and web hosting, and messing with Linux server stacks for around 30 years, now. You absorb a LOT over time, but it is all always changing. When I set up my first server, Cloudflare didn't exist yet. VPNs weren't a thing yet. The only people I knew with a network in their home were Computer Science professors. Wifi was not a thing yet. It isn't you being inadequate, it's you trying to do multiple jobs that each require constant professional development.

Because it's a complicated topic, you're just feeling the actual responsibilities of doing it right that many are ignoring now.

Its only daunting if you want to do everything from scratch. Depending on your needs you could easily build off an existing platform for home labs and servers. Its more of a tinker / experiment / use existing, then reverse engineer the parts you need to.

A good article on Home Server OS is here:
https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/best-home-server-os-2023/

You can Find some good Self-Hosting projects / apps here:
https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/

And finally, here are two examples of decent, simple to install all-in-one solutions, Yunohost is my go to for friends who want to start self-hosting as it sets up everything including SSO, DNS (via Adguard Home) and Certs via Lets Encrypt all in a nice web gui and admin panel.

Yunohost:
https://yunohost.org/#/

HomelabOS:
https://homelabos.com/

at a theoretical level

Theory + experience => skill

I say this because I am not sure how much of what you find "rough" comes from you not being familiar with it and how much comes from real hurdle (not that getting familiar with a subject is not a hurdle in itself).

Most blogs and articles I find...

Those are nice to get an idea but come on, read the doc. Do spend that time. Unless the service was extremely well designed and small in scope, getting a serviceable mental map of how it works can take days (or weeks if you really have no clue). There is no real shortcut to this. If the doc is not good enough, either walk away or engage with the dev/community to get things right.

It might be the first time in your life where you are confronted to having to get things perfectly right for a service to work at all (I say this neutrally, without meaning to offend) but this is how it is: this is what "work" means.

I implement everything with the help of chatgpt without problems. Of course, as the service on github has a lot of issues I skip it.

I feel like Self-hosting is like playing the game of life on the hardest mode possible.

The easiest is always to pay for services or let others have the responsibility. That's the Easy Mode.

When Self-hosting, mind blowing fucked up things will happen, your head will sometimes explode because you will doubt everything you learned, things that always worked will stop working for no apparent logical reason.

Maybe you'll understand that some data was corrupted, maybe you backed your servers up, maybe you didn't, maybe you can recover data, maybe you can't.

Sometimes you will feel amazing for your achievements, sometimes things just stop working even for things you won't control. ( Energy and Internet Suppliers ).

Most people even with high curriculum and studies opt for the easy mode. And that's okay.

Others enjoy the struggle and the amount of knowledge that comes with that.

Choose your path, and stick with it.

Pros of Self-hosting: self enlightenment, joy of achieving great things, freedom, saving money, power.

Cons of Self-hosting: Time consuming, stress, dangerous if not done with responsibility, requires patience and perseverance, may be actually more expensive on your personal and professional time, if your time can be indeed valuable. You may be able to actually sell more, or be more profitable if you don't lose time thinking about the hosting itself.

I've studied automotive and never really graduate, but I love reading manuals since I was a kid and always believe that even I don't know what am I doing as long I can read It's manual, guide, documentation and read support I could get a grasp of it even if it takes more time.

A part that made it easier for me to understand self-hosting is the raspberry pi. It let me thinker self-hosting without worrying about power bill, how can I easily reinstall its OS even if I make bunch of mistake, make different copies of my setup on different sd card without worries of hdd or ssd.

Then from that just upgraded stuff from what I've learned.

Because that means nothing?

"Why are computers hard"

"Why is car hard"

Maybe figure out what you're trying to do? "I can't figure out VPNs" is a pretty weird starting point considering you can just google VPN and click literally anything

As with everything in life you need to crawl before you run. And as someone mentioned before skills issue. You can assume most people who self host are Linux engineers / Devops engineers. So they do these kind of setups daily. This is why these channels exist. So we can assist or guide. So you can learn as well.

Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know.

Exactly.. I neither want "what z is" nor all the history behind z, the Z inventors life, his grand parents lives etc. I just want a solution to the problem im having..

Self-hosting is like any other topic in computing. You have to read, read and read. If you want to self-host a reverse proxy, go to the official documentation of the reverse proxy. What you are doing is searching for magic recipes in blogs and YouTube, that is why you feel it so "daunting".

As a software engineer of 17 years, you’re only 2 years in, you ain’t hot shit yet and have lots to learn. It can be difficult. Also, you’re probably just not great at searching/finding answers yet. Sometimes you need to look further down the Google results, or comb through closed issues/PRs in GitHub, or read a weird issue of StackOverflow that has a comment that links to another issue with the exact problem.

Researching / finding answers / problem solving / learning new things will be the #1 skill that will get you somewhere.

I would say the opposite: self hosting nowadays is very easy. Is the multitude of options and configuration possibilities that is daunting. We want too much and this increases complexity.

I am right there with you. I am a Mechanical Engineer and if we tried putting out a product with the limited documentation that these come out with, we would be taken off the project. ME projects have documentation meant to guide a 10 year old through the process and details. The documentation would fill a 3" 3ring binder.

Yet these network products are released with 1 page of upper level description of the product. Yeah I already know what the product already does, that's why I got it, how about the actual documentation?

Invest some time in understanding Docker containers and then install something like Portainer (for example on top of Proxmox + VM, or ProxMOX + LXC, or some Linux or bare metal) and then installing new apps will become very trivial once you understand how to "create" the containers and how to map the volumes and ports.

This is a swiss army knife of hobbies. I would say that yes it can be hard to get into if you try to do everything at once. I would pick one to three goals you want to accomplish and do those items. Once you have those documented and implemented, then pick up another task.

The amount of times I've completely rebuilt my home setups is... many. But to get where I am now, I would never have been able to plan it properly without the learning experience of "failing" so many times. And there will always be a better way to do it as things need upgrading so in a way it is perpetual. Start with the projects you want first. Get them working and make sure you can export the data properly before you begin to rely on them. Then once you have small bits done, add extras, like cloudflare, vpn, portainer, proxmox. There will be a lot of formatting and reinstalling and going back to the drawing board, just accept it as a learning experience but take each piece once by one. If there is a specifc

yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things.

There are plenty of guides out there that makes assumptions that you should already know things, which can be frustrating, I found this especially true with docker related documentation. If you find yourself on a github page, check the Releases tab. If it's still confusing there, check for a docker folder in the github and search "docker ". Start with popular more documented projects that will usually include beginner instructions that less popular software will omit. Even then if you keep looking you can usually fine one good doc that clears things up.

Also, in this realm, chat GTP excels at obscure configurations so it's worth giving it a shot when stuck.

If you want security and ease of use for remote access, just use Tailscale. Twingate if you share access with others.

The responses you get here are from people that have already perfected their setup so take them with a grain of salt.

I mean I have my setup running with Traefik, Crowdsec, Authentik and that's before the request even reaches the application.

2 months ago that was only Traefik.

A year before that I was using Nginx Proxy Manager instead of Traefik because it was easier to manage and understand.

Half the fun is evolving your homelab. Trying to start out with the full stack of things someone suggests is daunting and nearly impossible.

Take things one step at a time. And honestly if you don't understand what the documentation is talking about, YouTube videos are great. I've had to use it lots to understand how Authentik works but now I understand the docs

I'd say, start with a need and not with a tool. Tools are much easier to understand once you know the problem you have to solve.