I was wondering about the pros and cons about self hosting your services via Yunohost. I currently have all my services hosted in docker containers on a Debian homeserver. As I was planning on a fresh install, setting up an Ansible script to simplify backup & restoring and bake in a centralized user management system (currently I annoyingly have separate passwords for each service for my 5 users).
Now I was wondering if I could get some experience reports from Yunohost users. What are the problems you faced? Are you satisfied? Are there so many services you couldn’t find that you rather went the selfhosted way and integrate Authelia or a similar service? Any ideas and feedback is welcome that can help make up my mind.
It’s a mature, well-maintained system and has a solid catalogue of well-maintained apps. I run Nextcloud, Navidrome, Calibre Web, a Matrix Server and Element (on different I.P.s), Wallabag, a Firefox sync server and a Collabora office suite (REALLY useful) on a ThinkCentre Tiny that I got from EBay for just over £100 (storage extra!) It’s been running pretty seamlessly for over a year and I feel confident tinkering, doing routine things through the UI and getting a bit deeper with the CLI.
On the support, I’ve used a lot of FOSS support forums and I think YNH’s is one of the best. They are not as polite or friendly as Nextcloud’s and they will ignore irrelevant, snarky or duplicate questions, but if you have a genuine enquiry, they will hold your hand through a problem. I think they use a triage system and take shifts covering it. The XMPP chat, duplicated on Element, is also very helpful.
Personally, I have a fondness for Yunohost, in the same way I have a fondness for Debian and for Nextcloud. It is a well-organised group effort which requires some commitment and knowledge from users but not too much. It needs some attention but gives back more value than a user has to.put in. If I could learn all the ins-and-outs of network security, I might try a Docker set-up, just for boast-value, but with Yunohost I don’t have to.
I recommend Hendrick’s comment in this discussion.
I tried Yunohost once, and everything worked as long as I stuck to the officially supported apps. The community forum was supportive within reason, and would respond with advice fairly quickly. When I reported an error with an unofficial app, however, I was instantly told off that I shouldn’t expect any help.
Now, having used and admined my Linux desktop systems for a decade (without claiming to be an actual sysadmin), I nosed around the system a bit and to my eyes it seemed a right mess of app and user folders, permissions and containers. Surely, a combination of my limited understanding of server apps and a system that is made primarily for GUI use to make administration easier for beginners.
What I mean to say is, if you already run a set of working docker containers, you’re probably more advanced than the intended Yunohost user. I was that half ounce more literate that I became frustrated with the GUI-centric setup, and imperial pounds too illiterate to actually muck around in the command line.
Look at it this way, Yunohost offers a fraction of the apps available on Docker, and not all of them are maintained. They do offer a graphic admin interface and out-of-the-box working setups (or did five years ago when I tried it).
When I reported an error with an unofficial app, however, I was instantly told off that I shouldn’t expect any help.<
So, you’re complaining about a lack of support for an unsupported app? They are actually called ‘unsupported’. That’s quite a clue.
Also, the catalogue of supported apps is pretty huge now, thanks to a large and enthusiastic community.
Yeah, that’s the kind of unhelpful condescension I recognise from that “enthusiastic” community. Thanks for the nitpick.
I was in a similar situation as you, with an existing docker solution, looking for something easier to manage. Yunohost had this hype behind it that I couldn’t resist. At first it did seem easier with the official apps, but as soon as I needed anything outside the set boundary the dream collapsed. The final nail for me was not being able to get smb working.
Good thing I had kept my docker setup safe so it was easy to revert to it. It’s more of a pain, but it’s also more versatile and capable so I have no better choice at the moment. Portainer helps a lot.
If you have the knowledge to do what you’re doing now, you have no need for Yunohost. It’s janky at best and doesn’t have much facility for advanced use. It wants you to do it their way only, which is fine if you’re new at all this. Eventually, I think people just move on.
I tried it, but not knowing what was going on under the hood made me worried about how I would fix anything when it broke, and how timely updates to software would be. I also don’t think it had any kind of central user management for the installed apps.
If you’re already familiar with docker I would stick with that.
It has user-management, though. YunoHost comes with LDAP, provides email addresses to all users, a permission system to allow what groups of users can acces which services… And they integrate that into the individual services. That is, if they have some LDAP plugin. A decent amount of services can’t be tied into their user system. But it works flawless for chat, Nextcloud and the main contenders…
Interesting, as I remember it didn’t do integration with a lot of apps, so you end up with some that have auth and some that don’t at all, and some that you have to manage auth internally.
That is correct. Most big apps have LDAP auth and YunoHost will have them integrated into their system. But lots of other apps don’t have that, or it’s complicated for other reasons… And you’ll end up with those not integrated and seperate. They show you the level of integration somewhere.
