add blog post selfhosting setup

content/blog/2023-12-03-my-selfhosting-setup.md

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+---
+uuid: 3af67a63-5f3a-422c-8aee-5e3daa8921f9
+date: 2023-12-04T22:30:00
+created: 2023-12-03T22:08:16
+aliases:
+title: My Selfhosting Setup
+published: false
+modified:
+description: A short overview on how I self-host.
+cover_image: https://media.tiim.ch/4a0a43eb-cf95-4273-b6a6-e085c9123985.webp
+cover_image_txt: "Model: realvisxlV20_v20Bakedvae; beach sunset, palms, calm ocean, fine sand, cinematic shot, photorealistic ## (worst quality)"
+content_tags:
+  - ansible
+  - docker
+  - traefik
+  - server
+---
+
+> [!NOTE]
+> This post is meant as a reference for myself. I only published it in case someone else might find it interesting.
+> I did not spend much time on this post.
+
+I do host some services on a few rented VPS servers and on my "home lab", which is just an old desktop that is running in the basement.
+When I got into self-hosting, I decided I would host everything exclusively in docker, which has served me pretty well over the last few years. In the last while I
+have learned a lot about Kubernetes, and am strongly considering switching my "simple" hosting setup for a more complex Kubernetes cluster. So before I do that I want
+to write down what my current setup looks like.
+
+## Setup
+
+![](https://media.tiim.ch/0887e318-9359-4753-abaf-49ae7c26dfcd.webp)
+
+As mentioned, everything is hosted in docker containers. Generally, I try to keep everything in docker-compose, since this allows me to specify the settings of the container once, and easily modify it later.
+To have multiple services available on port 80 and 443, I use the [[Traeffik (Software)]] reverse proxy. I use Traefik without a config file, meaning it pulls the routes and rules directly from the labels of the
+running containers on the VPS. This makes it easy to launch a new service and have its reverse proxy config directly in the docker-compose file.
+
+Since many services use a database, and Postgres seems to be supported by many open-source projects, I decided to have a central Postgres instance running in a docker container. This allows me to
+back it up with a simple cron job in a single place. If a service does not support Postgres, I specify its database directly in the docker-compose file.
+
+Almost all services use disk access for either config, local files, or similar. I do have a docker folder that is the root of all locally stored files.
+
+## OS Setup
+
+When I first started, I configured everything by hand, and documented how, why, and what I did. However I was not happy with this, I could not test it out and it was prone to errors.
+Therefore, I decided to use Ansible to set up the server and install all dependencies.
+This worked well, so well that I decided that Ansible was good enough to use to operate the entire pipeline, even to automate the deployment of the services.
+
+## Deployment
+
+I do have an ansible role per service, with its configuration (mostly) as ansible YAML files, and the docker-compose files and other config files as ansible templates. This worked great, with a single ansible-playbook command I can
+make sure everything is running and has the right config.
+For most services, I even built logic to make sure that when the docker-compose file or a config file changes, the container is restarted.
+
+## The good parts
+
+I am quite happy with this system in general. Everything runs stable, backups are easy and automated, and deployments for services that are already configured are a breeze.
+I can keep the whole "description" of what is running in a single git repo, and make changes by editing config files.
+This is a huge step up from manually deploying and keeping track of what docker commands to use for what service.
+
+## The not so good parts
+
+Recently I noticed some pain points.
+
+1. If I want to deploy a service twice for two domain names, I have to create a copy of the role. This unfortunately leads to duplicated "code" which can (and does) lead to configuration drift.
+2. I have to code things myself that already exist. For example, restarting a container when a config value changes. For most services this is implemented, but not everywhere, and also not for all possible things that can be changed. This is not what I want to be concentrating on if I am writing the config to deploy a service.
+
+In general, I seem to have built a worse subset of Kubernetes myself, just without the robustness that makes Kubernetes so interesting.
+
+## My plan for the future
+
+I am planning to replace docker with Kubernetes, specifically [[K3s (Software)]], a very lightweight and mostly "batteries included" Kubernetes distribution.
+Ansible will stay, but only as a tool to set up and configure the OS, install dependencies, and install and run K3S. Deployment of services I either want to do directly using the kubectl command line tool, or more likely using
+[[ArgoCD (Software)|ArgoCD]], a project that pulls Kubernetes manifests from a Git repository and automatically deploys it.
+
+For the configuration, I will take a look at [[Helm (Software)]].