I’ve been dabbling with selfhosting for a bit now (home assistant and nextcloud), but it’s clear that I lack a fundamental understanding of networking. For example:
- I’ve got OpenWRT on my router, but no idea what I’m doing when it comes to firewall settings, DNS, DHCP, etc.
- I’ve got a domain thru Porkbun, but no idea how to properly setup my DNS settings there to route to my local machine.
- I’ve got NGINX running in a docker container in a VM and can get to the UI on my local network, but no idea what I’m doing wrong with my attempts at a reverse proxy.
Does anyone here have links to a good in-depth tutorial series for learning about securely selfhosting?
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In the past, I’ve found a lot of valuable resource at
One thing you really need to establish right from the start is the habit of taking detailed notes. It’s tedious, bothersome at times, but the ability to backtrack something that may not have deployed quite like you wanted, is invaluable. It will also save your ass in a month when you’ve forgotten everything you did before.
Take notes!
I think NetworkChuck has a good set of tutorial videos about self hosting. For the most part you can search for what you want to find info on and he probably had a video on it. E.g. Nginx: https://m.youtube.com/@NetworkChuck/search?query=Nginx
I’ll check him out, thanks!
Check FUTO’s guide. It’s great for beginners:
- Part 1: https://youtu.be/Et5PPMYuOc8
- Part 2: https://youtu.be/3fW9TV1WQi8
Firstly, use caddy. Fuck nginx and the rest. Pointless complexity
I am relatively sophisticated on LAN/local services (been running Raspberry Pi since 2018 or so), I was never able to setup a reverse proxy to get a true self-hosted system (i.e. remote access); got roadblocked by nginx and setting up letsencrypt with reverse proxy support.
In general, true remote access is IMO exponentially more difficult and demanding than getting things running on your local network.
For anyone starting out with self-hosting, I would strongly recommend LAN/local services where you can relatively easily deploy multiple very useful and powerful services (SMB/NAS, Jellyfin, Pi-hole, Qbittorrent-Nox).
I would suggest looking into DietPi, it’s IMO the best RaspberryPi/SBC distribution there is if you want things to just work and not bug you. Very helpful developers and community too. Excellent, user friendly CLI management tools for headless operation.
Great guides https://www.simplehomelab.com/
I have some script or maybe it was a program in a container that checks my isp IP and uses the domain provider api to keep the DNS set to the isp IP if it changes. I’m using opnsense but I’m sure openwrt has the same thing in some form.
Idk of any good series but techno Tim has a great video on using cloudflare and traefik to get wildcard letsencrypt ssls for your docker services.
