Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
view the rest of the comments
There's a whole lot of advice here, and practically none is it is aimed at a beginner. You don't need a reverse proxy or SSL to get started.
apache2orhttpd, depending your flavor of Linux./var/www/html/. If the file is something likeindex.html, it'll load as the default page without having to typehttp://youraddress/index.htmlsystemctl restart httpd, but "systemctl" might be "service", and "httpd" might be "apache2".Once you've done that, you have a computer that will serve your html files when someone hits http://[yourIP]/ . At this point, make sure your router/etc is allowing connections on port 80 (the http port), specifically to that one computer. Also, don't allow that computer to connect to the rest of your home network (not getting into a step-by-step here; every home network uses different hardware), because now that the Internet can touch it, it's a target for hackers. If all they can touch is this one computer (start calling it a server), the risk is minimal.
If you want to point a domain at it, that gets into DNS (the Domain Name System; literally how domains are mapped to IPs so humans don't have to remember them). Cloudflare has guides for this.
Since it's your home IP, it might change. Either be fine changing your DNS if your IP changes (which usually isn't often if you have a decent connection), or look into something called "dynamic DNS" (just a thing that grabs your current IP and updates your domain to point at it).
NOW you can start getting into things like SSL. Remember that SSL doesn't protect you from some guy trying to hack your site/server, it just makes it harder for them to view or change content while it's being sent from the server to a site visitor (or back again, if you have a form).
Google "add SSL to Apache", you'll find references to "VirtualHost" and a bunch of config lines starting with "SSLCertificate...". You'll also find plenty of references to "LetsEncrypt" (a free SSL provider) and "Certbot" (a program that lets you generate the certificates with LetsEncrypt). Follow those.
As above with port 80, you'll need to make sure that port 443 (the https port) is allowed for your server through your router. Again, block your server from connecting to the rest of your network. The Internet can touch it, someone will try to hack it. The SSL doesn't save you from this.
As for reverse proxies, you don't need one unless you're getting into load balancing or header manipulation (which means you'll probably never need one for this project).
I'm happy to answer follow-up questions.