A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I deliberately have not used docker at home to avoid complications. Almost every program is in a debian/apt repo, and I only install frontends that run on LAMP. I think I only have 2 or 3 apps that require manual maintenance (apart from running "apt upgrade"). NextCloud is 90% of the butthurt.
I'm starting to turn off services on IPv4 to reduce the network maintenance overhead.
It's a mess. I'm even moving to a different field in it due to this.
I definitely feel the lab burnout, but I feel like Docker is kind of the solution for me... I know how docker works, its pretty much set and forget, and ideally its totally reproducible. Docker Compose files are pretty much self-documenting.
Random GUI apps end up being waaaay harder to maintain because I have to remember "how do I get to the settings? How did I have this configured? What port was this even on? How do I back up these settings?" Rather than a couple text config files in a git repo. It's also much easier to revert to a working version if I try to update a docker container and fail or get tired of trying to fix it.
Check out the YUNOhost repos. If everything you need is there (or equivalents thereof), you could start using that. After running the installation script you can do everything graphically via a web UI. Mine runs for months at a time with no intervention whatsoever. To be on the safe side I make a backup before I update or make any changes, and if there is a problem just restore with a couple of clicks via my hosting control panel.
I got into it because it's designed for noobs but I think it would be great for anyone who just want to relax. Highly recommend.
As an example, I was setting up SnapCast on a Debian LXC. It is supposed to stream whatever goes into a named pipe in the /tmp directory. However, recent versions of Debian do NOT allow other processes to write to named pipes in /tmp.
It took just a little searching to find this out after quite a bit of fussing about changing permissions and sudoing to try to funnel random noise into this named pipe. After that, a bit of time to find the config files and change it to someplace that would work.
Setting up the RPi clients with a PirateAudio DAC and SnapCast client also took some fiddling. Once I had it figured out on the first one, I could use the history stack to follow the same steps on the second and third clients. None of this stuff was documented anywhere, even though I would think that a top use of an RPi Zero with that DAC would be for SnapCast.
The point is that it seems like every single service has these little undocumented quirks that you just have to figure out for yourself. I have 35 years of experience as an "IT Guy", although mostly as a programmer. But I remember working HP-UX 9.0 systems, so I've been doing this for a while.
I really don't know how people without a similar level of experience can even begin to cope.
I don't consider an app deployable until I can run a single script and watch it run. For instance I do not run docker/podman containers raw, always with a compose and/or other orchestration. Not consciously but I probably kill and restart it several times just to be sure it's reproducible.
I'm currently running three hosts with a collection of around 40 containers.
one is the house host, one is the devops host, and one is the AI host.
I maintain images on the devops host and deploy them regularly. when one goes down or a container goes down, I am notified through mqtt on my phone. all hosts, services, ports, certs, etc are monitored.
no problems here. git gud I suppose?