For this new year, I’d like to learn the skills necessary to self host. Specifically, I would like to eventually be able to self host Nextcloud, Jellyfin and possibly my email server too.

I’ve have a basic level understanding of Python and Kotlin. Now I’m in the process of learning Linux through a virtual machine because I know Linux is better suited for self hosting.

Should I stick with Python? Or is JavaScript (or maybe Ruby) better suited for that purpose? I’m more than happy to learn a new language, but I’m unsure on which is better suited.

And if you could start again in your self hosting journey, what would you do differently? :)

EDIT: I wasn’t expecting all these wonderful replies. You’re all very kind people to share so much with me :)

The consensus seems to be that hosting your own email server might be a lot, so I might leave that as future project. But for Nextcloud and Jellyfin I saw a lot of great tips! I forgot to mention that ideally I would like to have Nextcloud available for multiple users (ie. family memebers) so indeed learning some basic networking/firewalling seems the bare minimum.

I also promise that I will carefully read the manuals!

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    3·
    20 hours ago

    Documentation has been mentioned already, what I’d add to that is planning.

    Start with a list of high-level objectives, as in “Need a way to save notes, ideas, documents, between multiple systems, including mobile devices”.

    Then break that down to high-level requirements such as “Implement Joplin, and a sync solution”.

    Those high-level requirements then spawn system requirements, such as Joplin needs X disk space, user accounts, etc.

    Each of those branches out to technical requirements, which are single-line, single-task descriptions (you can skip this, it’s a nice-to-have):

    “Create folder Joplin on server A”

    “Set folder permissions XYZ on Joplin folder”

    Think of it all as a tree, starting from your objectives. If you document it like this first, you won’t go doing something as you build that you won’t remember why you’re doing it, or make decisions on the fly that conflict with other objectives.