Hello All,
I am really new to selfhosting, trying to learn the basics. I have a raspi 5 with docker installed and a domain. My question is, as I collect all my knowledge from all over the internet, is there a selfhosting guide for dummies? IT would be cool to have some guidance at hand to rfer to when i do dumb shit.
Thanks
Don’t expose things to the internet with port forwards. Anything you want to do like that can be done with a reverse proxy or preferably a VPN.
That is all.
It took me a while to learn that:
Reverse proxy= your page lives in your basement but only your DNS knows. From outside everyone goes to “my page is cool.com”
VPN= LAN but in WAN…go to Starfucks and you can still get your files from your basement’s NAS
I’m sure they got other meanings, but this frame helped me a bit. Hide your IP!
But no ports only regards the home network, right? The proxy Server has to have open ports, and the home Server that connects to the proxy (how ever that’s done) needs to receive the forwarded packages on its ports, no?
Yes. The proxy will have 80 and 443 forwarded from the router. Everything else gets proxied through your reverse so you can set basic auth on anything likely to be a security risk. Generally, you don’t want regular login pages exposed directly, they should be behind basic auth.
I think this question has been raised a few times here and I’m not aware of any “guide for dummies”.
Self-hosting is a wide topic and most of the knowledge is spread across the internet. I’d recommend going to communities like the one you just posted on, reading wikis and learning how to efficiently find information on the web. Most of the knowledge I accumulated over the years come from so many different places so I can’t think of a centralized knowledge base.
If you really want to have a handbook you can refer to you’ll have to write it yourself with your experience about your specific setup and environment.
Software: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Guide: https://github.com/mikeroyal/Self-Hosting-Guide
As a beginner you might want to start out with one of the all-in-one turnkey operating systems like yunohost.org , dietPi.com or unRaid or a bunch of others (see the awesome-selfhosted list)
https://perfectmediaserver.com/
Another good one!
Also, I started with a pi, added a synology (a NAS is a game changer), and then moved almost all services off the synology to a Beelink S12 pro. Recently upgraded the S12 to 32GB of memory, and I have a 2tb ssd upgrade I have to do soon. All of this is over the past 2-years.
Two sites that really helped me get the basics of docker compose were Marius hosting and Dr Frankenstein’s docker guides. Both are focused more on synology, but the docker stuff works anywhere.
ETA: linuxserver.io is pretty handy, too.
