What advice can you give to a beginner?
What advice can you give to a beginner?
You may have noticed a few of my posts here, I am very interested in self-hosting and what advice can you give to a newbie? maybe some literature, video, I don’t know~
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Honestly the single biggest thing to self-hosting is breaking stuff.
Host stuff that seems interesting to you, and dick around with it. If it breaks, read the logs and try to fix. If you can't, revert to a backup and try to reproduce.
If you start out with things that interest you, you'll more likely stick with the hobby. From there you can move to hosting things with external access - maybe vpn inside your own network through your router?
From there, get your security in line and host a basic webserver. Something small, low attack vector, and build on it. Then expand!
Definitely recommend docker to start with - specifically docker compose. Read the documentation and mess around!
First container I would host is portainer. General web admin/management panel for containers.
Good luck :).
Breaking things is the best way to learn. Accidentally deleting your container data is one of the best ways to learn how to not do that AND learn about proper backups.
Breaking things and then trying to restore from a backup that...doesn't work. Is a great way to learn about testing backups and/or properly configuring them.
The corrolary to this is: just do stuff. Analysis paralysis is real. You can look up a dozen "right ways" to do things and end up never starting.
My advice: just start. If you end up backing yourself into a corner where you can't scale or easily migrate to another solution, oh well. You either learn that lesson or figure out a way to migrate. Learning all along the way.
Each failure or screw up is worth a hundred "best practice / how to articles".
So. I added home assistant and homarr to my docker compose stack. When I updated the stack to pull the new images. I lost all my saved info and files. Why is this? I’m imaging I need to define a storage point for the files ?
Look up docker volumes.
Yep, that's exactly what you need. It's a right of docker passage to not have a volume set up and lose all of your settings/data.
What you are talking about is volumes. You can probably Google a dozen examples but I highly recommend trying chatgpt for questions like that.
It's pretty good about telling you what you need to do or how to fix a issue with your compose file.