yunohost VS Portainer

Pull that old laptop from the closet, the one with the broken screen and keyboard which made you so sad to put it to pasture since it did have plenty of memory and CPU to keep up. Install Debian on the thing followed by Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) [1]. Since you have 16GB of RAM in that laptop (or 8 but 16 is nicer) you should be able to run a number of containers [2].

Here's an idea, more or less based on a number of servers I configured for friends and family, based on 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 hardware with 2/4TB USB SSD. Your laptop will offer better performance.

- Create 4 or 5 containers and name them 'auth', 'serve´, 'base', 'backup' and 'mail' (if you want to run your own mail that is, otherwise skip that one). Their functions are:

> auth runs LDAP, Kerberos (if you want that), a central letsencrypt instance which takes care of all your certificate needs and anything else related to authentication and authorisation

> base runs databases, that means Postgresql, Mysql/Mariadb, Redis, RabbitMQ and whatnot - all depending on what you need.

> serve runs services, that means nginx or another web server which is used as a reverse proxy for the other web-related things you want to run: 'cloud' services like Nextcloud with everything that comes with it (e.g. Collaboraoffice or Onlyoffice to replace whatever web-based office things you currently use), communications services like XMPP, application-specific proxies like Invidious/Nitter/Libreddit, media services like Peertube/Airsonic/Ampache, a Wiki like Bookstack, search services like SearxNG, etc. - the size of your server is the limit.

> backup runs Proxmox Backup Server and is used to backup everything to some external drive and to some outside repository.

> mail runs mail services, only if you want to run those. I always say 'do it' but many people have an irrational fear of running their own mail services. That fear is not grounded in truth, running mail is not hard and offers many advantages over hosted solutions.

While it is possible to separate all the mentioned services out into their own containers I think this adds needless complexity for little to no gain. Separating out database services makes sense since those can end up quite taxing and as such might well be moved to their own hardware in some (possibly not too distant) future. Separating out authentication services makes sense since that lowers the attack surface compared to running them together with externally available services. The same goes for mail services which is why I put those in their own container.

Once you've got this up and running you can create a few more containers to play around with. If you just want to try out services something like Yunohost [3] or Caprover [4] can come in handy but I do not see these as viable alternatives to installing and running services which you intend to keep around for a long time.

Of course you can do most of this on a VPS as well but I prefer to keep thing in-house - the fewer dependencies, the better.

[1] https://proxmox.com/en/

[2] containers perform better and take less memory than VMs but if VMs are your thing that is possible as well

[3] https://yunohost.org

[4] https://caprover.com/

Yunohost is one of those mature projects, that's fully open source.

YunoHost, although not Docker-based, is still nice and quite mature.

If you want something like that, then CasaOS is pretty great and i can recommend it, especially for a beginner. There is also Cosmos and Tipi. Yunuhost too but a bit different approach. Oh and Umbrel is a thing...

However you quickly reach the limits of what Umbrel can do, its very basic in its abilities. Of course it depends all on what you (or anyone else) wants to do with it. There is also CasaOS which is very similar to Umbrel but last i compared, Casa offered a bit more features like for example adding your own docker projects easily. There is also Tipi which i must admit i havent taken a closer look at yet. And there is Yunohost which i guess aims at a similar audience but achieves these things differently, still worth mentioning tho.

This looks exciting and definitely something to look out for as an option fkr self-hosting.

Similiar and a little bit more mature is also YunoHost, https://yunohost.org/, or for professional environments, UCS https://www.univention.com/.

I use https://yunohost.org on my Pi, mostly for monitoring other stuff but you can get Nextcloud running just fine with it!

Portainer is a container management platform that provides a powerful web interface to administer your workloads. It natively supports Kubernetes environments to help you manage your Pods, Deployments, Helm charts, and other cluster resources. Portainer also provides robust RBAC capabilities and an external authentication layer, letting you grant team members access to Kubernetes through Portainer without directly exposing your cluster.

This episode is actually why I started this series in the first place. I am an active Docker user and Docker fan, but I like containers and DevOps topics in general. I am a moderator on the official Docker forums and I see that people often struggle with the installation process of Docker CE or Docker Desktop. Docker Desktop starts a virtual machine, and the GUI is to manage the Docker CE inside the virtual machine even on Linux. Even though I prefer not to use a GUI for creating containers, I admit it can be useful in some situations, but you always need to be ready to use the command line where all the commands are available. In this episode I will use Ansible to install Docker CE in the previously created virtual machine, and I will also install a web-based graphical interface, Portainer.

Portainer

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.