Selfhosted
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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At the homelab scale, proxmox is great.
Create a VM, install docker and use docker compose for various services.
Create additional VMs when you feel the need. You might never feel the need, and that's fine. Or you might want a VM per service for isolation purposes.
Have proxmox take regular snapshots of the VMs.
Every now and then, copy those backups onto an external USB harddrive.
Take snapshots before, during and after tinkering so you have checkpoints to restore to. Copy the latest snapshot onto an external USB drive once you are happy with the tinkering.
Create a private git repository (on GitHub or whatever), and use it to store your docker-compose files, related config files, and little readmes describing how to get that compose file to work.
Proxmox solves a lot of headaches. Docker solves a lot of headaches. Both are widely used, so plenty of examples and documentation about them.
That's all you really need to do.
At some point, you will run into an issue or limitation. Then you have to solve for that problem, update your VMs, compose files, config files, readmes and git repo.
Until you hit those limitations, what's the point in over engineering it? It's just going to over complicate things. I'm guilty of this.
Automating any of the above will become apparent when tinkering stops being fun.
The best thing to do to learn all these services is to comb the documentation, read GitHub issues, browse the source a bit.
Great points, as someone who is very happy with their current home automation and services, checking in the config files to a git repo was the critical step. Also backup volumes since many containers tend to store state in some binary or internal DB. At the very least try restoring the config to verify you have what’s needed. The containers should start even if they have no media on it.
In terms of tinkering not being fun anymore. That’s okay, sometimes you need a break.
A point that is sometimes not brought up enough in my opinion is to plan for loses. What can you afford to lose if you can’t backup everything (due to price, etc.)? config files and photos or personal data are relatively small (compared to something like a media library) and should be prioritized.