A few questions about selfhosting from a newbie

SniffBark@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 51 points –

Hi, I recently acquired a pretty solid VPS for a good price, and right now I use it to run Caddy for two personal sites. When I moved to Lemmy I found about this awesome community and it got me really interested in selfhosting. I won’t be asking for tips on what to selfhost (but feel free to add what you use), there’s a lot of posts about it to look through, but I was wondering: how are you accessing your selfhosted stuff? I would love to have some sort of dashboard with monitoring and statuses of all my services, so should I just setup WireGuard and then access everything locally? I wanted to have it behind a domain, how would I achieve it? E.g. my public site would be at example.com and my dashboard behind dash.example.com, but only accessible locally through a VPN.

I started to learn Docker when setting up my Caddy server, so I’m still really new to this stuff. Are there any major no-no things a newbie might do with Docker/selfhosting that I should avoid?

I’m really looking forward to setting everything up once I have it planned out, that’s the most fun part for me, the troubleshooting and fixing all the small errors and stuff. So, thank you for your help and ideas, I can share my setup when it’s done.

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exactly, when for example the nextcloud documentation says:

To start the container type: docker run -d -p 8080:80 nextcloud

is not exactly clear that all the data will be 100% lost when the docker container is closed

And when it says more down in the docs "just use volumes to persist data" - yeah how to backup those volumes? No mention at all...

Should tell to mount a directory rather than a volume. Backup a directory is easy and everyone can do it, backup a docker volume, good luck, your data has an invisible time bomb

Docker volumes are just directories in /var/lib/docker/volumes

yes but does a noob know that? A directory placed where he typed the command first is much easier to find

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@Moonrise2473 @cybersandwich I both agree and disagree... but always use named volumes. Easier to manage/monitor your volumes then use an <backup-container>, maybe rclone, that shares the same volume and sends the data to some safe place

or, if you still prefer, in your named volume section tell docker to use a custom path.

volumes:
myvolume:
driver: local
driver_opts:
type: none
o: bind
device: /host/path/to/volume

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