Hi all!
So I want to get back into self hosting, but every time I have stopped is because I have lack of documentation to fix things that break. So I pose a question, how do you all go about keeping your setup documented? What programs do you use?
I have leaning towards open source software, so things like OneNote, or anything Microsoft are out of the question.
Edit: I didn’t want to add another post and annoy people, but had another inquiry:
What ReverseProxy do you use? I plan to run a bunch of services from docker, and would like to be able to reserve an IP:Port to something like service.mylocaldomain.lan
I already have Unbound setup on my PiHole, so I have the ability to set DNS records internally.
Bonus points if whatever ReverseProxy setup can accomplish SSL cert automation.
I run a k3s cluster for selfhosted apps and keep all the configuration and docs in a git repo. That way I have history of changes and can rollback if needed. In that repo I have a docs folder with markdown documents about common operations and runbooks.
There are other ways to do this, but I like keeping docs next to the code and config so I can update them all at the same time. Deployed several wikis in the past but always forget to update them when I change things.
I really should spend time familiarizing with maintaining a git repo. I’ll likely find one I can self host.
https://forgejo.org selfhosted has been good for me, FOSS fork of Gitea.
Thank you for the suggestion. The fact that it’s FOSS wins my vote. I have been trying to go all open source where possible.
StandardNotes for me
I have an Ansible playbook that I use to setup everything and all troubleshooting steps I ever had to take to fix something get written down in an Obsidian.md vault.
I use markdown text files which are synced to my nextcloud instance.
This is somewhat tangential to your post, but I think using infrastructure as code and declarative technologies is great for reliability because you aren’t just running a bunch of commands until something works, you have the code which tells you exactly how things are set up, and you can version control it to roll back to a working state. The code itself can be a form of documentation in that case.
I think I need to utilize this strategy because I get lazy and don’t update external documentation.
Some examples of technologies which follow that paradigm are docker compose, ansible, nixOS and terraform. But it all depends on your workflow.
I think I am going down the docker compose route. When I started using docker, I didn’t use compose, however, now I plan to. Though, Ansible has been on my list of things to learn, as well as nixOS.
Right now, I’m using Obsidian. I think I’d like to transition to keeping docs in a wiki, but I worry that it’s part of the self-hosted infrastructure. In other words, if the wiki’s down, I no longer have the docs that I need to repair the wiki.
I have looked at Obsidian, it looks nice, but the closed source part is why I can’t personally use it. Though, from discussions I have seen Logseq be thrown out when talking about similar software.
The wiki idea is a good one. The way to handle that is to have the wiki backed up incrementally.
