Self-hosting
The pinnacle of self-hosting for me is the low-tech magazine’s solar-powered website. Turns out it’s not the end of the world if your site goes down for a few hours.
Servers #
Digital Ocean for docker containers and Cloudflare for serverless workers and pages. This page is served from Cloudflare.
RSS reader #
CommaFeed is nice. Minimal, fast, and easy to install. My previous RSS encounters were with Google Reader, Feedly, and Reeder 5 but the habit of checking the feed never developed, I hope something changes this time round.
If I were to change one thing about it, it would be the preview. I’d add a “See more” button from the Hey’s Feed feature. When you switch between long posts with CommaFeed, the scroll position is all over the place.
CommaFeed’s interface
Clicking on “See more…” in Hey’s Feed makes the post full-screen and scrollable but keeps the header sticky
Tools & skills #
- A combination of Terraform and Kamal is worth learning if you plan deploying and changing self-hosted software often. Terraform configures clouds and software and lets you store it in git.
- Docker Compose is the easiest way to get software running on a server and has vast learning materials on the internet. In particular, I trust Digital Ocean’s tutorials.
- Kamal can pre-configure a fresh VM instance to use it for your app.
- For example of a complex compose file see the one in the Airbyte’s repo. Study awesome compose for more.
- Digital Ocean’s 1-click docker VM is a fast starting place.
- Don’t forget to commit your work to git locally, on GitHub, GitLab. Source Hut looks promising too. Don’t commit passwords, API keys and so on, use a form of a
.envfile and a secret manager.
Automation & data nerds #
These tools can be helpful to small product teams, as well as for home automation:
- Metabase for dashboards and visualizing database content
- Unleash for feature toggles
- Airbyte for syncing data from external systems to yours
- Snowplow community edition for in-product events (as a replacement for Google Analytics)
- n8n is a very polished no-code workflow manager similar to Zapier or
NAS (Network-attached storage) #
I currently use Synology DS223 for photos and backups but I regret buying this particular device/brand. It has a few minor flaws: it is loud, its photo software is crap, and it doesn’t support hardware encryption. Most concerning however are the cloud features, which it constantly tries to sell you on.
The cloud lets you, as well as to anyone else, access your device over internet. It is convenient but it opens you up to the very real risk of letting someone access your files, run malicious code and connect to other devices on your local network. The DEFCON 31 – A pain in the NAS talk describes a combination of flaws in cloud APIs that gave the reserchears full access to all cloud-connected NASes made by Synology and Western Digital worldwide.
In any case, there's a few things I want to try with this NAS until I find a better alternative:
Relevant links #
- Perfect Media Server – opinionated guides to building an open source media server / homelab
VPN & privacy #
I use the Tor browser for quick access to blocked or sensitive resources, and a self-hosted WireGuard VPN instance when I need more flexibility.
Configuring WireGuard is frustrating even though some people would say it’s not but it is a skill that you can acquire quickly, and it’s cheaper and safer than any VPN provider known to me.
By the way, I started using Tor thanks to Corry Doctorow’s novel called Little Brother. If you are new to the privacy and security topic, this book is a good starting point.
LLMs #
On Apple Silicon, it’s a rather streamlined process when you start with Ollama and LangChain’s integration.
Remember just one thing: you can build complex LLM apps using simple tools like curl and regular expressions. You don’t have to learn Python or LangChain. The programming principle is very basic: text in (prompt) → text out (response). LangChain’s toolkit takes care of talking to the model, processing the text, and doing a few smart things, like making sure that the output is a valid JSON.
To grasp the bigger picture of your future deployment, I recommend this Mozilla blog post:
Other links #
- Self-hosting guide by Michael Royal
- How to build a low-tech website: software & hardware by homebrewserver.club