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- Hacker News
- Maybe it is because it is late on a friday, but as someone self-hosting 'hobby scale' sites, i honestly could not make it through the second chapter of this ramble.by PeterStuer
- I literally just sent some friends a docker image and told them to point Luna at it, for which they were set up in ~20minutes and $3 of tokens, so I'm skeptical.
My homelab is also currently ~40 nix service VM's plus a handful of Ubuntu, etc long tail, and some external DO droplets for NAT, and a more robust vlan config than I'd ever been able to put time towards before... which I haven't had to do more than a dozen hours of manual setup on IN TOTAL thanks to Fable, Sol and local Qwen.
There's truth in this post, but I doubt it's longevity.
by glaslong - Why split the nix into so many VMs instead of just systemd units?by KnightHawk3
- Lots of things break at hobby scale, mainly because hobbyists can have a huge range of experience, expertise, and willingness to do things themselves.
Anyone serving hobbyists, commercially or on a volunteer basis, needs to accept that there will be some number of hobbyists “below the line” of what you can reasonably support. Those folks will just struggle with what you can provide to them, and you will never be able to address all their complaints, concerns, mistakes, etc.
You just have to mentally cast them free on their own. At most, encourage them to find fellow hobbyists who can help them level up where they need to in order to engage with your offering.
by snowwrestler - Was this written by the Department of Demoralization?by andai
- Such defeatism indeed. I understand that things look complex but plenty of very complex apps can be self-hosted and they Just Work [TM]. Now, sure, there's work involved. But, just like many others, I can run Plex, JellyFin or Immich just fine and those are more complex than 99% of all webapps ever shipped.
We'got all the world's knowledge compressed and queryable with LLMs: there are way less configuration issues that I cannot solve today than used to be the case.
Did those in charge of those standards royally fuck up HTTPS/TLS? Of freakin' course they did. The interests of the big players, not the small ones, have been taken care of. And the result is an ultra complex mess of fucktarded standards.
But it is what is: it's what we have. And we'll make it work.
- All of those requirements seem weird. I selfhost a few software and the user count is one. My extent at sysadmin is to write a systemd service, configure the proxy (if it’s on a vps and I use subdomains), and maybe use ansible for scripting the provisioning and deploy.
It’s fine to publish recommendations how to tune configurations for specific usages. But I only need the app, not the various things that you may think I need. And I really want the app to only solve its essential problem. It should not take care of the IT part other than providing configuration samples.
by skydhash - And I do `docker compose up` now with a caddy server in front of docker, so I can just add a new site (sub domain or directory) that reverse proxies to that docker container's port. And the beauty is, that I have a skill for it for claude code, so I actually don't have to do any of that for my local self-hosted stuff.
I just call /publish-local-docker subdomain.mydomain.local
And if there isn't a docker compose, it will create one, and then run it, and update caddy server on its own.
by jermaustin1 - > Deployments not using Docker will no longer be supported.
This is the way (while also allowing people to use their own proxies etc., but being clear about those not being officially supported).
Ship your back end container, your front end container, tell people how to set up the off the shelf DB containers or whatever else your software needs and if you don’t need 20 different components like Sentry self-hosted versions do, you’ll be fine. The DB can be a container or not. The reverse proxy can be a container or not. Hell, if someone wants to build the back end or front end from source and serve them differently they can, just on their own time. That’s pretty close to the 12 Factor App principles.
Just avoid a lot of complexity when possible: do traditional SSR, or with some progressive enhancements or what I like to do in this day and age (unless maximum accessibility is paramount) only use your back end for the API and have a traditional SPA, none of that complex Next.js stuff. Your front end just becomes a bundle of files that you can put in a web server container to be proxied by whatever the ingress is. At most the Docker entry point would change some values in config.json that the app loads on startup in the browser.
If someone asks for Kubernetes support or whatever, just wish them the best of luck in setting it up themselves!
by KronisLV - I host a webserver for a living, so I might be too far removed from the problem; I don't see anything that 1 minute of effort as part of a less-than-10-minute session with an agentic AI tool can't solve safely. A decent README and project structure is all Codex/CC/Pi needs. I mean this even for the least-technical person who would be self-hosting something.
I guess that breaks the plug-and-play nature, but you can't expect something internet-facing to be plug-and-play. (Maybe that's the real travesty here.)
- At hobby scale, you don't have to care about the details. Just ship a zip or container image with docs and let the user figure out the rest. Self hosting is going to require some bit of expertise.
I personally don't like apps that ship the entire sink (complex stack) when I already have an opinionated setup that already includes TLS/access control/etc.
by turtlebits - I really wish people would tell me what the dependencies are and NOT just ram everything into a container image so I have to reverse engineer what's required to just run the damn thing on the stuff I am ALREADY running.
Just tell me what the entry point is and what the dependencies are for it so I can decide if I already have enough to just sort it out myself.
By all means, create a kitchen sink container image as well, but don't have that be the ONLY artifact for running it.
by scaryclam - I'm not sure I understand this post. Is this talking about self hosting Caddy in a home lab setting or just static web hosting on a VPS?by bradly
- It's partially about how complicated modern Web services can be, and why so many people just give up and ship a Docker container. It's also about how agonizing over the details is sometimes just wasted because all of your users are just AI scrapers.
An art professor I knew used to say about overwrought paintings "too much sugar for a dime". Technical people are often prone to this as well.
- I think the author missed the root cause, which is the demise of (unencrypted) HTTP/1.1 connections.by sam_lowry_
- I think the author is distributing a web app that is run by hobbyists with a lot of esoteric home labs?by tingletech
- > You document what needs to be reverse proxied and give examples for caddy and nginx, repeatedly cursing at nginx for not having an if that’s useful.
Somebody hasn't read the docs and doesn't understand how nginx's "if" works, because it's fantastically useful.
by lee_ars - I can relate to the TLS termination issue. It is difficult to provide a self hosted version of a web app with a sensible TLS setup.
The best is almost not to do it at all. Just have a docker image serve http/1.1 and document that a reverse proxy is required to expose the service.
There are simply too many ways to do it and every sys admin/hobbyist has their own preferred way.
For the anonymous and authenticated caching issues the author goes into, I think once again it is useless for self hosting. Just embed a performant web server like nginx for example that is pre configured to serve static files. Use proper headers, and predictable/simple paths. Self-hosted versions are going to be low traffic and just need to work.
Have advanced settings for more control, but keep the default simple and working out of the box with minimal dependencies.
by smashed - That is why my webserver only server-negotiate Cha-Cha/Poly at TLS level and rejects all else.
No caddy. No cache. No proxy.
A lot of scrapers give up.
Log rate remains low. Actual visits even lower.
Peace of mind, for a while:
by egberts1 - I don't know what you're on about. Just run Caddy and it does it all for you.by smw
- I have 5Gbps fiber at home. LAN is mostly 10Gbps.
I'm hosting few hobbyist public websites. One is the library of hymns, songs, ... - mostly PDF, MP3, MIDI.
OpnSense router -> Traefik -> Docker container.
That Docker container runs on NAS, which is connected via 1Gbps port.
Suddenly, last week I started to get over 1000 RPS. Was it scanner, parser, crawler, DDOS? I can't tell, as user agent was default Mac OS.
It was using ~1Gpbs bandwidth. From many IPs. If I would have it hosted at AWS / Azure, it would cost me > $40 / hour for the bandwidth. Unless I use some of their CDN.
My router CPU went high, but it handled it ok. NAS CPU went high, but it handled it ok. Traefik loaded the server heavily: it had to both receive and send 1Gbps. And write access logs for all requests. My Alloy & Loki logging system got loaded heavily.
NAS already have cache. I tried to enable cache on Traefik. It went OOM in 2 minutes: https://github.com/darkweak/souin/issues/844
When I searched, I found that Traefik cache with proper memory handling is available only in Enterprise version.
Solved the issue by putting the site behind Cloudflare proxy and enabling it's magic to protect from the bot.
by SlavikCA - INB4 someone complains about Cloudflare while not offering an alternative to these type of issuesby seki285