awesome-selfhosted VS Portainer

None of these lists ever seem to be as fleshed out, up to date, or well organized as https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted , though imo any more attention on the self hosted scene is awesome. We're now self hosting everything at my co-op, and it's a dream. Saves us money, provides learning opportunities, potentially is getting us work (managed hosting providers asking if we can be a devshop for their clients, for example), and lets us give back to the FOSS community as we uncover bugs.

We use:

* Matrix / Synapse for comms (slack alternative) (managed hosting through etke.cc)

There are a ton of resources about HW aspects of home labs for beginners but not so much for what to run on them and why. There are lists like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted but they are confusing for absolute beginners like me. Are there any good SE project guides you know?

This[1] seems like a well maintained repo.

And thank you for the pointers, we'll try to get ourselves added here :)

[1]: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

I've always felt like FOSS as a philosophy has been tangled up in trying to participate effectively in capitalism, when that was never really the point, nor really very possible unless you're lucky, nor really worth it. The origin of FOSS as I understand it from reading books like "Hackers" is from people that were mad that access was being restricted to systems and code from people that really wanted to use these systems and code, and hack them, and learn from them. I recall that one of the things Stallman likes to brag about from that time is not related to FOSS at all, but instead successfully decrypting a bunch of passwords, emailing the decrypted passwords to people, and recommending they instead set the password to an empty string instead. It was about keeping access to the system Free as in Beer.

I suppose some have argued that FOSS represents a Public Commons in the way that fields and wells and physical markets used to, but none of those things survived capitalism, so I don't see why a technological commons should be expected to either.

For me I've been thinking lately that perhaps those interested in FOSS should instead consider how we can use FOSS to detach ourselves from needing to participate in global capitalism at all. Is there FOSS technology we can use to liberate people from things they need to spend money on right now? An example could be the Global Village Construction Set: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ a set of open source designs for things like hydraulic motors or microcombines or steam engines that you can build on your own, usually not for cheap, but for far, far cheaper than you could buy from John Deere. Here's another cool project, some guy has just been building things like solar panels and basic circuit boards on his property from very base components for years: https://simplifier.neocities.org/

Some other FOSS liberation examples:

Combining a tool like Jellyfin with Sonarr, Radarr, and etc, can liberate people from their 5 different media subscriptions. Or at least they can still buy DVDs and put them on Jellyfin to have the convenience of streaming with the media library of their own choosing.

Deploying Matrix or another FOSS communication tool can let organizations have enterprise-level communication software without paying HUGE seat-based license fees to corporations like Slack.

In fact there's many ways to liberate yourself from paid SaaS in this list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted at my co-op we self-host and deploy all our services for this reason, it saves us a TON of money.

I don't have many other examples to mind because this is something I'm actively still researching. Friends in Venezuela though especially tell me how FOSS technology can liberate in ways I wouldn't expect here with my 64gb RAM machine with the latest processor, that I can easily replace components on on a whim. Such as how they can keep all their broken down machines pieced together from junkyards running pretty ok on various linux distros, and how they can sell creative work using free tools like gimp (no, really) or darktable. Like as not they'll just pirate software, though, but apparently FOSS often runs better on shitty hardware.

Anyway my long term plan is to find or build more and more things that let people just not spend money on things anymore. That could be by making it easier to not have to throw things away anymore, or building tools to replace proprietary ones, or, idk, other ways I haven't thought of.

Dashboard in what sense? Is this what you had in mind or no?

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#per...

I often skim through various "awesome lists" (e.g. [1]) and communities interested in open source apps like r/selfhosted [2]

[1] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/

1. https://nextcloud.com/ https://proton.me/drive https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#fil...

2. Download all data locally then upload elsewhere.

3. https://help.dropbox.com/security/privacy-policy-faq#7.-How-...

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.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).