Hi Everyone! Lately I’ve been captivated by the idea of self-hosting, and 2 days ago I got an old laptop from my sister and now I think it’s time for me to actually try. I have ZERO experience: I’ve always been interested in Tech and I like to try and play with lot of stuff, but apart from super basic use of bash and some fun in Android modding (playing with ROM, kernels and recovery) I know nothing. My idea is to start simple by self-hosting a mastodon server to learn the basic and maybe later try something like jellyfin, joplin and airsonic.
I tried to read as much as I could online, but it seems like there’s a jungle of possibilities out there and so I came here to ask if what would be my approach is sound or if I am completely out of my mind.
I started by installing NixOs on the above mentioned old laptop. Installing it was actually easy, knowing how to use will be the problem.
My idea is the following:
- Getting Cloudflare CDN with the Free-plan to hide my server IP
- Learn the basic of SSH and use it to to authenticate only via keys
- Learn and use nginx for reverse proxy
- Set up a firewall
- Install Mastodon code on NixOs
- Set-up my instance
- Use and maintain it
I understand that Docker is widely use to have multiple applications running on server and the advantage is that each application has its dependencies divided from the others. From my understanding though, also NixOs works in the same way (having dependencies divided for each package), so in theory once I install different applications on my machine I should be fine, or am I missing something?
Last but not least : do I need to buy a domain or is it just something cool/easier to have but that I can do without?
Many thanks in advance!
EDIT: Thank you all for the tips and suggestions! Really appreciate it! I will start by setting up my little media home server and then from there I’ll see 😊
First: Good for you, enjoy the journey! Second: Just as others already pointed out, Mastodon is not really a beginner project. You want to understand what you are doing, not just make everything work no matter what. Some reasons why I’d not start with Mastodon:
So instead: Have a look at awesome-selfhosted for ideas. A personal dashboard, photo gallery or a PiHole/AdGuard is a good start.
About Docker; it’s a bit more than just dependency separation. It’s a kind of virtualization, but without each container running it’s own kernel. Advantage is: Docker images run (with some configuration) relatively lightweight out of the box. So there’s no need to install the applications natively. While I’m a great fan of Docker, you’d probably learn more installing things natively in the beginning. Or maybe do both, it’s up to you. However, if you decide to use Docker, be sure to understand what’s going on under the hood. That’s where the fun begins. Everyone can pull and start images, but not everyone knows how to customize or build them themselves.
No matter what you decide to do, have fun. And if you’ve any questions, there’s plenty of documentation online or just ask. The selfhosting community is very welcoming towards new members ;)
While you’re getting started, put anything effemeral in Docker and keep anything meant to be persistent on the host directly.
Docker is great, but the number of times I’ve accidentally blown away data before I learned what I was doing… Just give it some practice before you put anything out there that you can’t remake quickly.
Been there, done that. Volatility is something you learn pretty early, yes. ^^