Amber on Nostr: when it comes to deploying services, find yourself deploying things that are ...

when it comes to deploying services, find yourself deploying things that are convenient to you to use. It doesn’t do you any favors to deploy nginx if your goal is to just deploy a static site and move on to the next thing. Part of homelab in my experience is self hosting software that I use. Take something like https://github.com/toptal/haste-server for instance, a self hostable pastebin. It’s pretty simple to deploy in a docker container. You can use this in combination with a domain to get into basic reverse proxy stuff. Let’s say you get a cheap domain, you go "hm. I want to have https for it". What’s the approach for that? You can renew your certs manually or use something called ACME. A protocol used to automate cert renewal. You get to automating it when you go "hm, this is tedious to keep up with my cert renewals. I wonder if I can automate it". Figure out things like "hey I want to host another service on the same IP” you go from using a simple tool like certbot for this one service to going "hm, I wonder if there’s a tool that lets me have services on subdomains & that automates cert renewal". Part of it is just being in groups that openly talk about their systems.

Now that I’ve talked about reverse proxies I’m sure you’re interested in learning the other ones. https://traefik.io/ Traefik is nice (if you have someone who you can ask various things about it) especially for docker environments. I configure my docker containers with Traefik via tags. It does a majority of the config for me when I write my config in my tags and do docker compose up. What is docker compose? Find yourself asking questions to get to what you want to do. What are containers? What’s the difference between podman, docker? Why would containers be useful? Etc. so many small things that are super hard for people to get into unless they have an end goal.