Yunohost frustrations of the beginner self hoster

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨schmorpel@slrpnk.net⁩ to ⁨selfhosting@slrpnk.net⁩

I have started setting up a server with three domains and three users using Yunohost, but I find it hard to get to work.

The documentation can be frustrating to go through and the community on the forum answers slowly or not at all (because due to the sparse documentation questions from beginners like me tend to touch similar topics I guess). A big part of the forum answers are in French, which I don’t read very well.

All in all I have been trying very hard to like the project. The work done by the developers really deserves all my respect and I would love to remain involved, but trying to get Yunohost to work as a non-techie leaves me often desperate and looking for alternatives with a more active community or a more thorough documentation.

I’m a bit divided here. I like the project but I’m a half-techie stoopid who needs more support. What do? And what would be my alternatives on a Linux VPS? Especially if I don’t want proprietary stuff?

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schmurian@lsmu.schmurian.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think yunohost is great to get your feet wet with selfhosting. But as soon as your setup is a little bit more complex or not following the cookiecutter templates, you will end up building systems from scratch.

And to be fair, most of the software for selfhosting comes with good documentation. Yes, there is a learning curve, but if you are serious about it, you will stick to it until you find the piece of software working.

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- schmorpel@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’m serious about not wanting my email, files, publishing in the hands of corporate anymore, so I’m determined to get that running for myself. But I don’t want to sit in front of a screen all day to keep it running. I just want my two static professional websites for my clients to look at, and one or two small wikis that so far will not have more than two or three collaborators to start with.
  
  What means ‘from scratch’ for you? Installing a linux distro and then telling it what to do over command line? And what exactly would I need to tell it to do? If you have any learning resources that would be great. I wonder if all those services that supposedly make the work easier just add more layers of complication in the end.
  
  But yes, to get a vague idea about what the basics of server administration even are, yunohost is great! I’ve learned so much in a few days.
  
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  - schmurian@lsmu.schmurian.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I tried docker and stopped shortly after, because it was adding a layer of complexity I was not prepared for at the beginning. So I started with services I could run on bare metal with an OS like Ubuntu. For this a basic website for clients could be a good starter because it might only need a reverse proxy with php and a database. BUT this already opens questions around how secure is your server, which would be the first topic I would focus on, especially when hosting stuff for clients. Because if something happens to their data, you‘re responsible for it.
    
    If it‘s just a static page like a portfolio, simple things like restricting access with firewalls ACLs and other basic server configurations might already be enough.
    
    For hosting email, this topic still hasn‘t come to a mence for me, because it sounds like a lot of time and effort that goes into maintenance so I keep looking for hosted services with a good privacy approach.
    
    What resources are you thinking of (there are many). Again, the best way of approaching it is take something with little dependencies and components that are well documented and easy to learn, so you can focus on how to monitor the host, and make sure you can administrate it fast and efficiently.
    
    Later on you can add more complex services and learn about the new components.
    
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- RandomLegend@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  My opinion as well.
  
  I entered the self hosting with literally zero experience and went into docker with portainer as management frontend.
  
  Still suits me well and I’m running 3 servers with well over 30 services now
  
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  - schmorpel@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I have been looking into docker and I’m afraid it looks rather complex, how much time did you have to invest to have something up and running?
    
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Linyeir@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I have been using yunohsot for ages now and i really do like it very much. I had little to no problems most of which i could solve myself. And if i couldnt, i found the time for answers in the forum were quite okay, considering that they are volunteering their time.

Yes, there are some limitations on packages and stuff, but the alternative is using docker and portainer and hours of fiddeling with configurations that i am just not able to invest.

If you could be specific about your problems maybe i could answer them and add them to the documentation.

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- schmorpel@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  There is so much that does work with Yunohost, and I wish I could just sort out the difficulties and not have to learn something more complex - it’s not justified for such a tiny use case.
  
  First, I don’t understand if there’s a difference between admin user and the user I specify in the first setup, and how that related to file and folder access. If I want admin access over ssh, do I login as ‘firstuser@mydomain.com’ or as ‘admin@mydomain.com’?
  
  Ultimately I’ve just looked into this admin stuff because I need SFTP access to my dokuwiki and can’t seem to get it to work. First user has access to a few folders, but not the ones dokuwiki actually is in. Trying to get access via SFTP, I managed to ruin my entire server yesterday thanks to playing with file permissions (and learned that changing file permissions in the command line = DANGER!)
  
  Also, but less important unless I want a lot of wikis, I would like to run Dokuwiki in a farm setup (one Dokuwiki installation, several wikis). Same problem around file access, because I cannot create a directory for the animals.
  
  The beauty of dokuwiki is it’s database free, simple to understand folder structure but if I cannot access it over SFTP there’s not really a point to it.
  
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