selfhosted

My personal choice of self-hosted apps.

This project is accompanied by toots on Mastodon: mastodon.social/@holtwick.

My Recommended Services

• BirdsiteLive is a Twitter to Mastodon proxy. You can follow Twitter accounts as if they were Mastodon ones. -> github
• Gitea is a bit like Github, but for smaller groups. It helps you to manage code and tickets. But also provides a super easy registry for your private packages. it is tiny and fast. -> gitea.io
• Nextcloud is your "Cloud Service". I use it for file sharing mainly. But it can do most things Google and Apple offer as well, like mail, contacts, calendar, office tools. -> nextcloud.com
• LanguageTool LanguageTool is your private instance of the best grammar and spell checker available. When you use this private instance, you have less to worry about non-public texts going through a public checking service. -> languagetool.org

New entries from time to time...

Get Started

I run my stuff on a cloud server instance at Hetzner. There I choose the "Docker" presets. Any other provider will probably work as well.

Then the first thing to do is to set up a Nginx Proxy Manager. This is as easy as creating a folder named proxy and put this docker-compose.yml file in it. Then start with docker compose up -d.

The proxy does two things:

1. It manages your projects
2. It manages your SSL certificates via Let's Encrypt

Now we can get started setting up more services. The best thing to do upfront is to configure a wildcard in your DNS, like *.selfhosted.example.com pointing to your cloud server instance.

Setup Project

To install a project:

1. Copy the docker-compose.yml to a subfolder on your cloud server.
2. Start it from there with docker compose up -d.
3. In the web interface of the Nginx Proxy create a "Proxy Host" with:
   • Domain Names: Something like my.selfhosted.example.com
   • Scheme: http
   • Forward Hostname / IP: The container_name you chose in the docker-compose.yml.
   • Forward Port: The port the service usually uses.
4. You can then also request the SSL certificate from there.

Please note, that each docker-compose.yml includes these lines:

networks:
  default:
    external:
      name: proxy

This is required to allow connection to the Nginx Proxy.

Another convention is to not use Docker volumes but redirect to a local data folder. This helps with backups and porting to other instances.