cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24823173
Hi folks, looking for a bit of steer to get off the ground with self hosting. My goals to start with are pretty straight forward:
- I want to set up Home Assistant to move my smart devices off the cloud and fully contained within the walls of my home.
- I want to set up my own little Pixelfed server for my family’s use, along with some other federated socials.
From what I was looking at, I think my easiest route to doing both of these things is with a Home Assistant Yellow (built-in Zigbee and Thread system) with a Raspberry Pi 4.
I’ve never done anything like this before but I’m interested in learning. If anyone more experienced has any insight or direction, I’d really appreciate it! Cheers!
Yes! Mostly having a plan on how to make your service reachable in the internet while keeping the rest of your local stuff shutdown.
Many people recommend cloudflare, but I don’t think it’s necessary. If you get a public IP from your ISP, it’s relatively easy with dyndns. Personally, I have a virtual machine running nginx as a reverse proxy and configured the router to forward port 80 and 443 to that machine.
Cool! Good to know! Will definitely be back to this post to follow up once I make some prog!
Try to stay away from exposing applications via proxy or port forwarding. Learn how to use Tailscale and use applications via VPN instead. It installs on any pretty much any device, so it’s not difficult to keep everyone behind the walls and not leave any backdoors for the barbarians.
Thanks! Any trusted resource you’d recommend (text or vid) to learn more on the topic?
Awesome Open Source youtube channel isn’t bad. He’s fairly good at explaining a lot of the concepts. I wouldn’t say I’d use everything he recommends but he gives you enough info to make some judgement calls.
I’d also highly recommend the Selfhosted podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting. Alex, the main host is with Tailscale these days, but don’t let that put you off, he’s been doing the podcast (and recommending Tailscale) since long before he started working with them. I imagine there’s a YT channel for the show, but I’ve only ever listened to the podcast.
Also, 2.5 Admins from Late Night Linux group of podcasts has Jim Salter and Alan Jude, both long time sysadmins and developers that have a lot to talk about that’s of interest to self-hosters and professionals alike.
I’d also highly recommend getting boned up on basic Docker usage, and would point you towards starting right from the beginning to use docker compose with local bind mounts, and ignore these one-line docker commands to start containers. There are helper apps like Lazydocker to assist using Docker from the command line. While you can use GUI apps like Portainer, honestly you’ll just end up more confused than pasting stuff into a compose file and watching it with Lazydocker.
And feel free to ping me if you get confused, I’ve helped a few people sort out what they want to accomplish and point them the least-effort direction, or at least what I consider such.
Holy moley!! Seriously, really appreciate all those resources and the time it must have taken to write that!! Super excited to get stuck into this so will absolutely be making my way through all of these!!