I have started setting up a server with three domains and three users using Yunohost, but I find it hard to get to work.
The documentation can be frustrating to go through and the community on the forum answers slowly or not at all (because due to the sparse documentation questions from beginners like me tend to touch similar topics I guess). A big part of the forum answers are in French, which I don’t read very well.
All in all I have been trying very hard to like the project. The work done by the developers really deserves all my respect and I would love to remain involved, but trying to get Yunohost to work as a non-techie leaves me often desperate and looking for alternatives with a more active community or a more thorough documentation.
I’m a bit divided here. I like the project but I’m a half-techie stoopid who needs more support. What do? And what would be my alternatives on a Linux VPS? Especially if I don’t want proprietary stuff?
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I think yunohost is great to get your feet wet with selfhosting. But as soon as your setup is a little bit more complex or not following the cookiecutter templates, you will end up building systems from scratch.
And to be fair, most of the software for selfhosting comes with good documentation. Yes, there is a learning curve, but if you are serious about it, you will stick to it until you find the piece of software working.
My opinion as well.
I entered the self hosting with literally zero experience and went into docker with portainer as management frontend.
Still suits me well and I’m running 3 servers with well over 30 services now
I have been looking into docker and I’m afraid it looks rather complex, how much time did you have to invest to have something up and running?
Well, in terms of learning, I‘m still learning, and I‘m already a few years in. In terms of time in front of a screen, it depends on how much automation you throw at your services and builds. It will always come back to questions like: what if an update changes the way the software works? What if something breaks, like a config or a dependency overwrites another. How good do you know the parts of the services for troubleshooting? Do you have a backup? How fast can you rebuild your systems? If you have answers to these questions, you can feel confident in hosting services for yourself and others. If not, you can try but will run into these moments at some point, where you need to fix something fast. And that‘s the moment where you spent your time in front of a screen.
It’s easier than it looks.
In 99% of cases you can basically just copy paste the docker compose or the docker run commands and just change the paths for your system.
I’m serious about not wanting my email, files, publishing in the hands of corporate anymore, so I’m determined to get that running for myself. But I don’t want to sit in front of a screen all day to keep it running. I just want my two static professional websites for my clients to look at, and one or two small wikis that so far will not have more than two or three collaborators to start with.
What means ‘from scratch’ for you? Installing a linux distro and then telling it what to do over command line? And what exactly would I need to tell it to do? If you have any learning resources that would be great. I wonder if all those services that supposedly make the work easier just add more layers of complication in the end.
But yes, to get a vague idea about what the basics of server administration even are, yunohost is great! I’ve learned so much in a few days.
I tried docker and stopped shortly after, because it was adding a layer of complexity I was not prepared for at the beginning. So I started with services I could run on bare metal with an OS like Ubuntu. For this a basic website for clients could be a good starter because it might only need a reverse proxy with php and a database. BUT this already opens questions around how secure is your server, which would be the first topic I would focus on, especially when hosting stuff for clients. Because if something happens to their data, you‘re responsible for it.
If it‘s just a static page like a portfolio, simple things like restricting access with firewalls ACLs and other basic server configurations might already be enough.
For hosting email, this topic still hasn‘t come to a mence for me, because it sounds like a lot of time and effort that goes into maintenance so I keep looking for hosted services with a good privacy approach.
What resources are you thinking of (there are many). Again, the best way of approaching it is take something with little dependencies and components that are well documented and easy to learn, so you can focus on how to monitor the host, and make sure you can administrate it fast and efficiently.
Later on you can add more complex services and learn about the new components.
Sorry, wasn’t clear, it’s my own and my kids portfolios I’m hosting, I do not host anything for professional clients (yet). So it’s basically our own choice how concerned we want to be about uptime right now. I have been looking around and I think I’ll end up hosting these portfolios as HTML and CSS sites with My Webapp. They are now Wordpress and Dokuwiki, but that’s just overkill and just happened because that’s what we had available per One-Click install on shared hosting before. Then I can install one or two or even three Dokuwikis, one for personal note keeping and one or two for collaborative projects.
I found emails to be working fine under Yunohost, got all of the accounts I created there set up in Thunderbird eventually after finding out where to change DNS zone entries at my provider.
I think I will play with it a little longer, and as a learning resource for the basics I decided to dive into the Debian administrator’s handbook (books are my favourite resource), after all that’s what Yunohost is built on.
Now for all of that: I’d love to have it all in a home computer git repository to work on, and then push it to the server. Would that be possible?
For the future (maybe a project for dark winter evenings), I might decide to split up my setup and run my personal websites or even all of them on a solar-powered setup at home. I predict that I will not be able to resist this idea for very long, given that I have all the components already at home. So far about sitting in front of a screen, or tables full of cables and plugs. I guess I do enjoy it at times.
It’s just that I do need time for my animals, and my garden, and my job - so server admin is hopefully not a 24/7 thing for the things I have in mind.
I totally can relate to that, and have similar project waiting for me.
When it comes to wordpress, we quickly abandoned it in favour of simpler, static site generators, based on the fact, that we don‘t need all of the bloat that comes with wordpress. If you‘re interested, hugo is one example that is referred to quite often.
A git repository should be doable. Not sure about the wordpress part, but I guess anything could be setup with CI/CD pipelines or with ansible if you‘re up for another tool. (There‘s currently a hype around this approach and I see why it appeals, but I haven‘t wrapped my head around that tool yet)
I’m wary around new hypes - I have come to prefer the simplest, less complex solution in many things in my daily life (think local) and after extending some days of thought around the matter I’m getting more and more convinced it makes sense to extend this to computing - and it seems that in computing and in daily life hypes are something to rather avoid or at least not immediately jump in with all assets (eyes the drone collection gathering dust in a corner). Computing should support real life, it doesn’t really have to be pretty or complex. It’s great for collecting knowledge, connect points of knowledge, and make them accessible world wide (the only exception where I would embrace ‘think global’). And it really, really should be decentralized.
But then, I’ve not really gotten the ‘big picture’ around server administration and website administration yet to really appreciate if some of the newer approaches are helpful. I sometimes get stuck in a ‘back to the stone age’ approach that just hinders whatever I’m trying to do.
Yeah, I feel the same about hypes, still ansible seems like a useful concept. Anyway, I agree it should support actual needs and not collecting dust somewhere. Which in my case are some microcontrollers.
Lemmy was my way back into federation and so far I enjoy it! :)
It think to strive for a simple to maintain solution is not necessarily requiring technology from the early days of the internet. We‘ve come a long way and personally I enjoy to be able to build something „simple“ that still looks modern. So, yes. I try to keep the amount of screen time small, but there are so many cool services out there to try!
I have been using yunohsot for ages now and i really do like it very much. I had little to no problems most of which i could solve myself. And if i couldnt, i found the time for answers in the forum were quite okay, considering that they are volunteering their time.
Yes, there are some limitations on packages and stuff, but the alternative is using docker and portainer and hours of fiddeling with configurations that i am just not able to invest.
If you could be specific about your problems maybe i could answer them and add them to the documentation.
There is so much that does work with Yunohost, and I wish I could just sort out the difficulties and not have to learn something more complex - it’s not justified for such a tiny use case.
First, I don’t understand if there’s a difference between admin user and the user I specify in the first setup, and how that related to file and folder access. If I want admin access over ssh, do I login as ‘firstuser@mydomain.com’ or as ‘admin@mydomain.com’?
Ultimately I’ve just looked into this admin stuff because I need SFTP access to my dokuwiki and can’t seem to get it to work. First user has access to a few folders, but not the ones dokuwiki actually is in. Trying to get access via SFTP, I managed to ruin my entire server yesterday thanks to playing with file permissions (and learned that changing file permissions in the command line = DANGER!)
Also, but less important unless I want a lot of wikis, I would like to run Dokuwiki in a farm setup (one Dokuwiki installation, several wikis). Same problem around file access, because I cannot create a directory for the animals.
The beauty of dokuwiki is it’s database free, simple to understand folder structure but if I cannot access it over SFTP there’s not really a point to it.
users
Every admin group user is an admin, you get to specify the first one because without one you wouldn’t be able to use the web portal.
When in doubt, anyway, you can just use SUDO or su to get to root.
file permissions
I use it for Joplin and my easy way to do this is just installing nextcloud, striping it all of the things I don’t need, mount all the folders into it and just use it as SFTP
An alternative is FileBrowser but there was something bugged so I kept nextcloud.
one installation more wikis
I don’t think you can. Or maybe yunohost does it automatically because it usually shares resources, they are not containered… I would probably just install more of them.
All the issues I’ve got with yunohost during these years are basically divided into 2 categories:
- it’s because I’m selfhosting at home with a Pi
- the package was bad
Maybe I’ll pass to basic sysadmin too one day, or I’ll try abra from coopcloud but Yuno is really good imo :)
They recently added the possibility to have keys of the domains they give you, so also using their domain cuts a lot of overhead if you don’t need to publish personal sites!
I use it for Joplin and my easy way to do this is just installing nextcloud, striping it all of the things I don’t need, mount all the folders into it and just use it as SFTP
How does that work? Do you install Nextcloud inside Yunohost? Does that give you root permission to access the files of other apps on your server?
Yep, on yunohost. For the permission, it’s harder to write than to just do it. There is the external storage panel into nextcloud interface that will let you put admin nick and pass to then mount folders that are “external” to nextcloud 👍👍
Any Open Source alternative to nextcloud that would permit the same?
You know that nextcloud is open source, right? Btw FileBrowser should do
Ah yes, the admin thingy. They changed how admin-permission work with a recent version, maybe they havent changed all documentation yet.
My current understanding: The user you created on first setup is the admin user, or rather it is in the admin group and therefore has admin rights.
And regarding the sftp acces to doukwiki i have not experience, but someone on github has a solution for a similiar problem, maybe this could help with permissions. https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/dokuwiki_ynh/issues/83
