How do you set up a server? Do you do any automation or do you just open up an SSH session and YOLO? Any containers? Is docker-compose enough for you or are you one of those unicorns who had no issues whatsoever with rootless Podman? Do you use any premade scripts or do you hand craft it all? What distro are you building on top of?
I’m currently in process of “building” my own server and I’m kinda wondering how “far” most people are going, where do y’all take any shortcuts, and what do you spend effort getting just right.
I’ve recently switched my entire self hosted infrastructure to NixOS, but only after a few years of evaluation, because it’s quite a paradigm shift but well worth it imho.
Before that I used to stick to a solid base of Debian with some docker containers. There are still a few of those remaining that I have yet to migrate to my NixOS infra (namely mosquitto, gotify, nodered and portainer for managing them).
Kubernetes.
I deploy all of my container/Kubernetes definitions from Github:
A series of VPSes running AlmaLinux, I have a relatively big Ansible playbook to setup everything after the server goes online. The idea is that I can at any time scrape the server off, install an OS, put in all the persistent data (Docker volumes and /srv partition with all the heavy data), and run a playbok.
Docker Compose for services, last time I checked Podman, podman-compose didn’t work properly, and learning a new orchestration tool would take an unjustifiable amount of time.
I try to avoid shell scripts as much as possible because they are hard to write in such a way so that they handle all possible scenarios, they are difficult to debug, and they can make a mess when not done properly. Premade scripts are usually the big offenders here, and they are I nice way to leave you without a single clue how the stuff they set up works.
I don’t have a selfhosting addiction.
NixOS instances running Nomad/Vault/Consul. Each service behind Traefik with LE certs. Containers can mount NFS shares from a separate NAS which optionally gets backed up to cloud blob storage.
I use SSH and some CLI commands for deployment but only because that’s faster than CICD. I’m only running ~’nomad run …’ for the most part
The goal was to be resilient to single node failures and align with a stack I might use for production ops work. It’s also nice to be able to remove/add nodes fairly easily without worrying about breaking any home automation or hosting.
raspberry pi, arch linux, docker-compose. I really need to look up ansible
