I’ve been accused of “gate keeping” when I tell people that this is a shitty way to deploy applications and that nobody should do it.

No shit. Why would they even say that?

Ahhh, self doubt, my old friend…

“There is probably a better way” is a fairly common feeling. In fact there probably is a better way. But at some point you need to be pragmatic and be happy with “good enough”. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good (enough) as they say…

That said - follow your intuitions as well that things could be done better. Don’t be afraid to just re-write a bunch of things to see if an idea works better. Like grouping things from some “common.php” into domain specific functionality (dates.php, db.php, etc.). Or re-working how your front-end works. Maybe read other code or ask for code review from people more experienced, or even from an AI (yes, yes, I know, but they can be useful).

One problem you can find yourself in is that you’ve created code that’s very difficult to understand, but since you’re “in it” right now you understand it completely. If you put the code down for a week or two and come back to it you may find it very difficult to re-learn. If using classes, creating a DAO layer, or some other pattern helps to make your code easier to read then it’s worth following.

Some people get into self hosting because they want their data to be their data. They don’t care about the particulars, they just want that peace of mind.

These people are the worst. What they want is fine - but the idea that you don’t need to worry about the particulars is ridiculous.

I think you could take this arbitrarily far.

This can be said about literally anything. And it’s a “slippery slope fallacy” to use as an argument.

There are “appropriate levels of understanding” I’m advocating for. I’m not even saying “don’t use yunohost” - just understand what the components you’re using do and how they interoperate.

How do you know that people do not read the scripts first and come to the conclusion “that is safe, nice that somebody build a convenience script I just need to read”?

🤣

Also, what can I expect concerning RAID? That is definitely the most concerning thing for me, as I’ve never worked with it.

Generally speaking it’s recommended these days to use a software RAID rather than relying on hardware. If anything happens to that RAID controller you will need to replace it with a duplicate in order to mount your drives. Software RAID is controlled by the Linux OS and would be much easier to recover. There used to be a bit of a performance penalty for a software RAID but these days it’s negligible.

That’s fair - I’ll keep that in mind in the future to be more clear.

Really grasping now aren’t ya?

Right? This is the whole “lack of understanding” that I’m going on about. “But the install instructions for some other application said to do this.” So it becomes cargo-cult system administration.

It’s how we end up with curl https://some.rando.url/install.sh | sudo bash -c as an acceptable way of installing software. Don’t understand it, don’t question it, don’t look at what that shell script you’re running as root does, just copy / paste / and go! I don’t want to care about the details!

And you see it in the comments in this forum where anytime anyone asks a question there are dozens of replies like “just use yunohost” or “just rebuild your entire server with unraid” without addressing the one component that needs addressing or offering multiple solutions. It’s just “my click and forget solution worked for me so it’s the way everyone should do it.”

This is how we end up with walled gardens - to protect these people from themselves. Self-hosting should involve some amount of learning about what you’re doing because “there be dragons” out there.

I have nothing against yunohost or letsencrypt (the latter is simply amazing) - but one should understand that these things are components that are part of a larger system.

</rant>

Er… I’m not - I’m deriding that fact. Do you know what “ignorant” means?

“Reads like an ad” - see also “simile”.

Who gives a shit? I don’t know how to write apps for my phone either, I just click the install button and away I go.

Yeah - I’m the one wallowing in ignorance.

Sometimes people are just passionate about things. Like digital sovereignty.

🙄

Who gives a shit? I don’t know how to write apps for my phone either, I just click the install button and away I go. I don’t have time for a new career. If it weren’t for YNH I wouldn’t be hosting at all. And it’s not for lack of trying. Shit is complicated.

I’m always a little surprised when people are passionate about being ignorant.

It still reads like an ad for yunohost…

I think one of the mistakes many newb self hosters make is thinking of systems in their entirety rather than as components.

“How to install pihole on a raspberry pi” and “how to setup nextcloud on yunohost” are examples. All using very specific tools and very specific steps.

I’m noticing this more and more with documentation for apps where they tell me to use their specific docker-compose file and have instructions to use let’s encrypt in a specific way rather than referring you to let’s encrypt as an option and pointing you at their docs.

People aren’t learning how to use each of these tools and how to be flexible in their implementation.

In part one, I explained why I’m passionate about self-hosting and I discussed what you need to get started on this journey (a VPS and a domain name)

You didn’t need either of those things. This reads like an ad for yunohost.

12 pages of detailed documentation

Home Gamer: Is this it?

Man, what a stupid idea .DS_Store was.

Yeah - that’s why I was careful to say “most”. Stay away from weird “immutable” shit.

The “multiple distros thing” is often the most confusing aspect of the Linux ecosystem. But don’t sweat it too much - they’re more similar than different. Generally speaking you can do all the same things with most any distro.

The most user-facing differences are in the installer, default UI settings, and how applications are installed. A lot of it is simply preference.

All of the ones you mentioned are “fine”.

But if you want to “distro hop” (something that I consider to be a mostly pointless activity) then you need a way to preserve your home directory between installs. It’s where all of your settings are kept. The two ways of doing that are typically a) have a backup somewhere (recommended regardless) and b) put /home on a separate disk partition (more advanced - easily Googleable though).