From reddit selfhosted: What do you wish you knew from the start
reddit.com
I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.
- What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
- What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
- What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
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You usually want less integration, not more. Simple self-contained things. Nginx is good at that. That's also why you don't want to use Nginx Proxy Manager or Certbot's Nginx integration etc. It first looks like they make it easier, but there is too much hidden complexity under the hood.
Also, sooner or later you will run into some software that you would really like to try, which is only documented for Nginx and uses some sort of image caching or so, that is hard to replicate with Caddy etc.
How do you obtain ssl certs then?
I switched to Dehydrated (with dns-01 challenge), but Certbot itself is fine, the problem is the Nginx integration that tries to automatically change your Nginx config files.
Do you manually update the config every 3 months?
??? The location and the file name of the certificates don't change, so why would I have to do that?
On the contrary, before I disabled the certbot's Nginx integration, every three months certbot would "manage" to break my Nginx and I had to manually repair it.
I think we are not talking about the same thing. I mean the Certbot extension that automatically modifies the Nginx config files. A telltale sign are usually the comments "#managed by certbot” that it likes to leave behind all over your config files.
I've only really use caddy and my only experience with ngnix is ngnix proxy manager (which isn't really true ngnix).
I wasn't sure if hot swapping certs (even with same name was possible, kinda thought you would to reload it upon cert change).
Also regarding cert bot I have only used it in manual mode so it's managed mode is a bit foreign.
Not sure I agree about proxy manager. Anything you need to access is in the gui. You can easily add advanced configs to the entries. Been using it for 5 or so years, and there hasnt been anything I was missing from using straight nginx before that.
The benefit of using config files is easy version management via git.
Makes it easy to rebuild from scratch and easy to rollback a change that breaks something
Fair enough. I manage the same by backing up the vm its on.