For this new year, I’d like to learn the skills necessary to self host. Specifically, I would like to eventually be able to self host Nextcloud, Jellyfin and possibly my email server too.
I’ve have a basic level understanding of Python and Kotlin. Now I’m in the process of learning Linux through a virtual machine because I know Linux is better suited for self hosting.
Should I stick with Python? Or is JavaScript (or maybe Ruby) better suited for that purpose? I’m more than happy to learn a new language, but I’m unsure on which is better suited.
And if you could start again in your self hosting journey, what would you do differently? :)
EDIT: I wasn’t expecting all these wonderful replies. You’re all very kind people to share so much with me :)
The consensus seems to be that hosting your own email server might be a lot, so I might leave that as future project. But for Nextcloud and Jellyfin I saw a lot of great tips! I forgot to mention that ideally I would like to have Nextcloud available for multiple users (ie. family memebers) so indeed learning some basic networking/firewalling seems the bare minimum.
I also promise that I will carefully read the manuals!
Working hands, ability to type characters into keyboard.
Honestly, you just need to pick a video on follow along these days. There’s a load of YouTube videos out there that take you step by step.
Lewis rosman recently put out a 14-hour mega video of doing everything, well he might have made some controversial choices, The outcome is quite comprehensive.
Determination, patience, a willingness to learn anything you need to.
If you have those, in time, you will be able to get your lab up and running. I started mine with a minimal knowledge of Linux (I could install it from a USB and poke around). Now it’s the center of my families digital life.
You’ll get there in time.
Experimenting with VMs is the way forward.
Basic networking knowledge is vital. And being able to configure your own firewall(s) safely is an important skill. Check out something like Foomuuri, or Firewald. Shorewall is brilliant for documentation and description of issues (with diagrams!) but it does not use the newer Linux kernel nftables and is no longer actively developed.
Go for it with Nextcloud.
I would also recommend at least having a shot at setting up an email server, although I would recommend pushing through to a fully working system. It is possible, and is very satisfying to have in place. The process of setting one up touches so many different parts of internet function and culture that it is worth it even if you don’t end up with a production system. The Workaround.org ISPMail stuff is a good starting point, and includes some helpful background information at every stage, enough so you can begin to understand what’s going on in the background and why certain choices are being made - even if you disagree with the decisions.
Python is great for server admin, although most server config and startup shutdown snippets are written in BASH. You will no doubt have already begun picking that up as you interact with your VMs.
Take the time to properly understand Linux file ownership and permission. Permission will be the cause of many issues you will encounter in you self-hosting journey on Linux. Make sure you know the basics of
chmod(change permission) andchown(change ownership), Linux users and groups. This will save you some head-scratching, but don’t worry, you will learn by doing !Remember that, if you setup everything right, especially with docker, running as root / with
sudois not required for any of the services you may want to run.Give Nextcloud AIO a shot. I installed bare metal the first time, but AIO has decreased my maintenance burden to next to nothing. Before that, it felt like every update would break my system. I’m a year or two into my transition from Linux nerd to self-hoster. I still fail at things on occasion, but I have learned a lot. I hope it goes as well or even better for you.
I’ve hosted NC for a decade, and the AIO was the first method that doesn’t make me dread updates. And I’ve used pretty much every method of installing it over the years, everything sucked.
I snapshotted every time before and update because I knew it was a crapshoot whether the update was going to crater the system, and I’d roll back and wait for a working update to come out. Before snapshotting, I had to fix borked updates about every second time.
the patience to read lots of documentation.
And maybe patience to power through a lack of documentation.
if you could start again in your self hosting journey, what would you do differently? :)
That’s an excellent question.
If I were to start over, the first thing that I would do is start by learning the basics of networking and set up a VPN! IMO exposing services to the public internet should be considered more of an advanced level task. When you don’t know what you don’t know, it’s risky and frankly unnecessary.
The lowest barrier to entry for a personal VPN, by far, is Tailscale. Automatic internal DNS and clients for nearly any device makes finding services on a dedicated machine really, really, easy. Look into putting a tailscale client right into the compose file so you automatically get an internal DNS records for a service rather than a whole machine.
From there, play around with more ownership (work) with regard to what can touch your network. Switch from Tailscale’s “trusted” login to hosting your own Headscale instance. Add a PiHole or AdGuard exit node and set up your own internal DNS records.
Maybe even scrap the magic (someone else’s logic that may or may not be doing things you need) and go for a plain-Jane Wireguard setup.
For sure use Tailscale for VPN. They have apps for iPhone, Android, macOS, and Linux, so setting up your own personal network will be easy. Hosting on the real internet is definitely advanced and not always necessary.
You don’t need to be a programmer to selfhost.
The most important “skills” to have if you want to selfhost imo are:
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Basic Networking knowledge
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Basic Linux knowledge
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Basic docker/docker compose knowledge
But I’d say to not get lost in the papers and just jump right in. Imo, the best way to learn how to selfhost is to just… Do it. Most everything is free and fairly well documented
Totally agree! I’m not a programmer and I have several services running in my home server. I’m just curious and have used Linux for a decade as a normal user. With just these 3 basic knowledge skills you’re good to go.
Perseverance
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One thing I would do differently is setup LDAP and OIDC so you can use the same authentication credentials for different apps (at least the ones that support them). I use LLDAP and Authelia for this purpose.
Docker really. If something goes bad, trash the container and start again without loosing your actual data.
Mostly Docker.
Portainer and plugging Docker Compose XML into Portainer stacks makes Docker stupid-simple. (personally speaking as a stupid person that does this)
Cloudflare tunnels for stuff people other than you might want to access.
Tailscale if it’s only you.
Reverse proxy & port forwarding for sharing media over Jellyfin without violating the Cloudflare Tunnel ToS.
Dokploy is a pretty easy web gui and is itself a docker container.
Makes it dead simple to manage multiple containers and domains. (Not for power users that need kubernetes level flexibility)
- Docker: You can practice on your main computer before complicating things with networking.
- How to set up a reverse proxy: DNS, certificates, etc. I recommend Caddy.
- Backups: If you use Docker Volumes, make sure you back those up too and test the backups.
To self-host, you do not need to know how to code.
To self-host, you do not need to know how to code.
I agree but also say that learning enough to be able to write simple bash scripts is maybe required.
There’s always going to be stuff you want to automate and knowing enough bash to bang out a script that does what you want that you can drop into cron or systemd timers is probably a useful time investment.
Learn how to properly backup your data in case you nuke something you shouldn’t
And regularly check them. I just found out the hard way this last week that my backups haven’t been running for a few weeks …
Yep.
I have friends in the SMB space, one thing they do is a regular backup verification (quarterly). At that frequency, restoring even a few files (especially to a new VM), is very indicative, especially if it’s a large dataset (e.g. Quickbooks).
In Enterprise, we do all sorts of validation, depending on the system. Some is performed as part of Data Center operations, some is by IT (those are separate things), some by Business Unit management and their IT counterparts.
Unfortunately, that wouldn’t have done anything. Because I did that in December and they stopped running like 2 weeks after my verification. I would have caught it on my next scheduled validation, but that doesn’t help me now 😕
I mean, it still helps right? It limits your losses to X weeks instead of X months or, I hate to say it, X years.
I think if you have a mini PC or something you don’t mins installing server specific OS on, proxmox VE is pretty great. It can be a bit of a headache depending on what you want to do but it also makes expanding your self hosting super easy/fun.
Proxmox let’s you created virtual machines or containers and easily manage them.
Currently I run a mini PC.(Beelinks are great for this and pretty cheap with more power than a raspberry pi)
- Proxmox VE as the operating system
- Jellyfin as my media server
- looking to install home assistant and some others as well.
- Tail scale to use as a VPN into my network privately from anywhere.
Simplest set up? No. But I also just started self hosting. You’re gonna hit some.headaches regardless but it’s also extremely rewarding and I’ve learned alot.
Edit: if you’re only wanting to run one thing (say jellyfin) . A raspberry pi with tail scale and jellyfin is how I started. Works just fine.
If you want to program something, the closest you’re gonna get to programming is Ansible and Bash scripts.
You might want to get self hosting hardware like Synology or the like if you’re not ready to dig.
Otherwise here’s some things you need to know:
- Docker
- Easy, consistent deployment of services in their own environments. Think a VM but with almost no overhead.
- Docker Compose
- Run docker containers with consistent configuration in files.
- Connect various containers to each other on the same or different networks.
- Get multiple containers to start together and talk to each other.
- Systemd
- Manage any service on Linux. If anything needs to start on boot, restart when crashed, start on timer, you want Systemd.
- You can manage your docker compose containers lifecycle via Systemd.
- NGINX/Apache/Caddy
- A web server for reverse proxy. You’d probably need one at some point, especially if you want HTTPS. Your services get hidden behind it.
- ZFS
- Reliable redundant storage. You’ll need storage. Use ZFS with 2-disk redundancy.
- Supports automatic snapshots for recovering from oopsies. E.g. deleted something or some software shat on your data.
- Can use recertified disks from serverpartsdeals.
- Can use USB disks or USB box with multiple disks. If you end up going the USB route, ask me for tested hardware.
- Backup system
- Something to do backup. There are many options.
- Ansible
- If you want to write code that describes your services and make them happen, you want Ansible. You write code (well YAML) and Ansible installs things, writes config files, sets up Systemd services, restarts things. It can be convenient especially if you have a lot of stuff and you want to be able to see all of your infrastructure in code in one place and be able to version it.
- Prometheus
- Monitoring your stuff. Is my backup service running? If not send me an email.
Oh and use Debian or Ubuntu LTS.
Ansible is nice but I’ll repeat (as I said in another thread) it’s kind of advanced and gives a much better return on investment if you manage several hosts, plan to switch hosts regularly, or plan to do regular rebuilds of the environment.
Great summary!
Why Debian or Ubuntu? (I have my own thoughts, but it would be useful to show even high-level reasons why they’re preferred).
Re: Backup - Backblaze has a great writeup on backup approach today. I’m a fan of cloud being part of the mix (I use a combo of local replication and cloud, to mitigate different risks). Getting people to include backup from the start will help them long-term, so great you included it!
Predictable cadence, stable operation, timely updates, huge community and therefore documentation. You can get up to 5 years from an LTS release of Debian or Ubuntu. With Ubuntu LTS and Ubuntu Pro (free) you could theoretically run a machine without upgrading for 10 years. If you run workloads in containers, it doesn’t matter how old the host OS is. As long as it’s security patches, you can keep on trucking.
If you end up going the USB route, ask me for tested hardware.
Send these my way chief
As briefly as possible:
- Host side
- If you use Intel, all is well.
- If you use AMD…
- Prior to AM5
- Use an ASMedia PCIe USB card (StatTech, Sonnet)
- X570 is especially bad, though I’ve had some success with B350, when using the chipset ports. The CPU ports are all bad. Small form factor PCs often only expose CPU USB ports. They work with single disk per port but if you peg a port with a multi-disk box, they crap out regularly.
- Post AM5
- Have only tested USB4 on X870 and it’s solid.
- Prior to AM5
- Client side
- WD Elements / MyBook
- If you get disconnects under load and you’re not on a shit AMD USB host, the USB-SATA controller is overheating. Open them and ahere a heatsink on it. Drill a hole in the case above it for better ventilation. Disconnections will stop. If you don’t want to deal with any of that buy the item below.
- OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad
- Well built, solid controllers, no issues over a year of testing. I have 2, hosting an 8-disk RAIDz2 and 2 hosting a 5-disk RAIDz2.
- Terramaster
- A friend bought a 6-bay and tore it down for me. It has the same controllers as the OWC in a similar topology. If it’s cheaper it might be OK. I can vouch for the OWC though.
- Cables
- Get name brand cables, ideally higher spec than what you’d need! They aren’t important for a single USB disk but running a 4-disk box can max out the port bandwidth. If the cable can’t handle it… errors.
- WD Elements / MyBook
Much appreciated 🙏
Gnarly stuff with the WD’s huh? Unfortunately I think that’s what I’ll end up having to put up with since I can’t really find the other options for a decent price around here.
Funny enough I was half-considering just using a bunch of WD Elements. You think the MyBooks might fare any better?I used a mix of Elements and MyBook for years. Upon opening to heatsink, I didn’t see any significant differences between them. They use ASMedia or Jmicron, mostly ASMedia. The overheating issue depends on ambient temp and load. I’ve had one machine in a basement never experience them. Either way the solution is pretty straightforward and cheap. Once heatsinked, I haven’t had a problem.
The cables they come with are good.
- Host side
- Docker
