home-ops VS renovate

These are great operational wins. Agreed very much that having autonomic (can fix itself) systems at your back is a massive game changer. De-crustifies the act of running things.

The other win is that there's a substantial cultural base to this way to go. Folks have been doing selfhosting for ages, but everyone has their own boutique setup some their way. A couple tools and techniques could be shared, but mostly everyone took blank slate configs & built their own system up, & added their own monitoring & operational scripts.

https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops is a set of helm scripts and other tools that is widely widely used, and there's a lot more like it. It's a huge build out, using convention and a common platform to enable portable knowledge & sharing.

Self hosting did not have intellectual scale out at it's back, before Kubernetes came along. Docker and ansible and others have been around, but theres never been remotely the success there has been today in empowering users to setup & run complex services.

We really have clawed out of the server-hugging jungle &started building some villages. It's wonderful to see.

Going thru this repo https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops

Take a look at my open source GitOps repo managed by Flux here: https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops

Im fully onboard with the geneneral idea as a target.

Right now it's for early early adopters. Hosting stuff is still a painm But we are getting better at hosting stuff, finding stable patterns, paving the path. Hint, it's not doing less, it's not simpler options: it's adopting & making our own industrial scale tooling. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops is a great early & still strong demonstration; the up front cost od learning is high, but there's the biggest ecosystem of support you can imagine, and once you recognize the patterns, you can get into flow states, make stuff happen, with extreme leverage far beyond where humanity has ever been. Building the empowered individual is happening, and we're using stable good patterns that will mean the individual isnt so off on their own doing ops- they'll have a lot more accrued human experiene at their back, their running of services isnt as simple to understand from the start but goes much much further, is much more mature & well supported in the long run.

My Kubernetes cluster, deployments, infrastructure provisioning is all available over here on Github.

For example: https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops/pull/4528

I'm running minio in my cluster with NFS backend just fine. You can see my deployment of it here.

This month, I gave a talk with my Zenika colleague Lise at the DevoxxFR conference about Renovate and Dependabot, two great tools to help you automatize and upgrade your dependencies.

There is no built-in Renovate Bot on a self-hosted GitLab. What can we do to set it up and enjoy all the benefits of automatic dependency updates?

> Yes, it is awesome until you have to sysadmin it, apply updates, patch it, fix security holes, etc. I am not saying all self-hosted solutions are like that. There are exceptions. However, the majority of open-source self-hosted solutions require a lot of extra work.

I'm currently self-hosting 10 different applications on my local server, which represents everything I've ever seen that looked fun or useful to me. Every one of them had a Docker image with an example compose file, which means updating them just requires periodically running Renovate [0] on the repo that stores all my compose files and then running a script that docker compose pulls the updates. It takes maybe 10 minutes every other week, and is actually kinda fun.

It helps that all the apps are only accessible from within my VPN, so I'm not too worried about fixing security updates within a tiny time window.

[0] https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate

This is a big deal! Where did you read this? I found:

https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/discussions/26917

Renovate is an automated dependency management tool that can be used to keep your dependencies up-to-date. It can be configured to automatically create pull requests to update your dependencies, and it supports a wide range of package managers and platforms.

To get started with Mend Renovate, the comprehensive official documentation provides detailed instructions on installation, configuration, and best practices. Additionally, the Mend Renovate community forum offers a platform for users to connect, share experiences, and access the collective knowledge base.

It is a good practice to keep software up to date. To track changes in upstream software, we can utilize automatic dependency tracking systems such as Dependabot or Renovate. This is a broad topic and requires a separate article to be covered. If you would like to read about it, please vote in the comments section below.

So do other forges: I have Renovate [0] set up on my self-hosted Forgejo and it's worked great so far.

[0] https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate

You can ease some of the burden for yourself though using tooling. If you are using GitHub, dependabot can be configured to make automatic PRs to your repo whenever there are dependencies to update. If you're not a GitHub user, you can use renovate which even supports self hosting.