Hi all!
So I want to get back into self hosting, but every time I have stopped is because I have lack of documentation to fix things that break. So I pose a question, how do you all go about keeping your setup documented? What programs do you use?
I have leaning towards open source software, so things like OneNote, or anything Microsoft are out of the question.
Edit: I didn’t want to add another post and annoy people, but had another inquiry:
What ReverseProxy do you use? I plan to run a bunch of services from docker, and would like to be able to reserve an IP:Port to something like service.mylocaldomain.lan
I already have Unbound setup on my PiHole, so I have the ability to set DNS records internally.
Bonus points if whatever ReverseProxy setup can accomplish SSL cert automation.
Right now, I’m using Obsidian. I think I’d like to transition to keeping docs in a wiki, but I worry that it’s part of the self-hosted infrastructure. In other words, if the wiki’s down, I no longer have the docs that I need to repair the wiki.
I have looked at Obsidian, it looks nice, but the closed source part is why I can’t personally use it. Though, from discussions I have seen Logseq be thrown out when talking about similar software.
The wiki idea is a good one. The way to handle that is to have the wiki backed up incrementally.
I run a k3s cluster for selfhosted apps and keep all the configuration and docs in a git repo. That way I have history of changes and can rollback if needed. In that repo I have a docs folder with markdown documents about common operations and runbooks.
There are other ways to do this, but I like keeping docs next to the code and config so I can update them all at the same time. Deployed several wikis in the past but always forget to update them when I change things.
I really should spend time familiarizing with maintaining a git repo. I’ll likely find one I can self host.
If you want a git “server” quick and low maintenance then gitolite is most likely the best choice. https://gitolite.com/gitolite/index.html
It simply acts as a server that you can clone with any git client and the coolest part is that you use git commits to create repositories and manage users as well. Very very or no maintenance at all. I’ve been using it personally for years but also saw it being used at some large companies because it simply gets the job done and doesn’t bother anyone.
I use markdown text files which are synced to my nextcloud instance.
This is somewhat tangential to your post, but I think using infrastructure as code and declarative technologies is great for reliability because you aren’t just running a bunch of commands until something works, you have the code which tells you exactly how things are set up, and you can version control it to roll back to a working state. The code itself can be a form of documentation in that case.
I think I need to utilize this strategy because I get lazy and don’t update external documentation.
Some examples of technologies which follow that paradigm are docker compose, ansible, nixOS and terraform. But it all depends on your workflow.
I think I am going down the docker compose route. When I started using docker, I didn’t use compose, however, now I plan to. Though, Ansible has been on my list of things to learn, as well as nixOS.
I have an Ansible playbook that I use to setup everything and all troubleshooting steps I ever had to take to fix something get written down in an Obsidian.md vault.
StandardNotes for me
