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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 just have a couple of headless AlmaLinux boxes. Almost all of my apps are set up inside docker containers. If I have some time, I do plan to change the system to Debian stable/NixOS, given the recent RHEL drama. But otherwise, I think this is the way to go. Self hosting "solutions" tend to actually create more problems than they solve.
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.
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.
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
I tried Yunohost and found the permissions were so restrictive that I couldn't manage to setup my own backup solution on it. Tipi is really neat, but the apps I was interested in were very outdated. I opened an issue on git for it and basically the answer is either wait for someone to port the new version or do it yourself.
So I went back to unRAID and it's been working reliably and is fairly easy, just not a one click install like Tipi can be.
So, I'm going to be running my own gateways in a datacenter.
My setup is going to consist of the BIRD Internet Routing Daemon (for BGP) and gatekeeper (for edge DDoS protection).
In the process of building a server for it. So far, I have a dual 25gbps card and 3x dual 10gbps cards, so I can do colocation and have uplinks right off the router.
Mostly, I need to pay for transit, so I can announce my IPs over their network.
I use a Yunohost for more about 1,5 year. I love for stability and simplicity but also openess for more pro users. I have my own backup solution that works great. Yunohost isn't popular but has big catalogue. Some of the apps are not present in catalogue, so I use Docker on second device to get them.
I've used Yunohost for two years and a half, it is good for me to step up my Linux / cli game while enjoying a fully featured and functional solution. I played a bit with Linux at work decades ago but couldn't have found the time back then to dig into selfhosting from scratch. It is still a good solution for me, I am also looking at Runtipi for the next setup, that I will install at a family member's house, mostly for mutual backups.
All I read however points to the fact that debian + docker is not far out of my reach. Runtipi seems like a middle step
Those platforms are great for beginners, and I'm genuinely a fan of anything that increases accessibility in this space.
That said, I want control more than I want accessibility these days. Even Portainer is getting to the point where I think I'm going to ditch it in favour of just managing my compose files directly.
It's easy to get going with something like that, But it's much harder to migrate to something else. Additionally yunohost doesn't have Support for some kind of containerisation, which I find very useful, when I just want to try some application and completely remove it afterwards (without praying that my single database doesn't break). I mostly use portainer to manage my Selfhosted applications, and it would be quite easy to switch to docker compose or another container orchestration platform if portainer does something funky