Ask HN: How do you self-host your apps?
Hello everyone!
I'm looking for feedback from people who selfhost their own environment.
I'm building a tool to simplify deployment and management and make it feel more like a PaaS. I was also frustrated by the speed of CI/CD runners.
Here's what I've settled on:
- Docker compose files to describe services
- Docker swarm as an orchestrator
- One command to setup a new server and add it to cluster
- Secrets and server credentials are encrypted with age and stored inside the repository alongside the code
- Easy way to add secrets and config files to your service
I built it initially for myself, so I'm probably missing some pain points other teams have. A few questions for anyone running their own infra:
1. What's the orchestrator you're using - k8s, docker swarm, etc.? Or none at all?
2. How do you manage secrets?
3. Where do you store images - self-hosted registry, GHCR/Docker Hub or no registry at all?
4. How long does your CI/CD pipeline take end to end?
5. What's the size of your team?
Anything you wish existed but doesn't? Or anything I'm clearly getting wrong? Cheap mini pc on an isolated vlan. Running a cloudflared tunnel or reverse proxy to a vpc on digitalocean, maybe moving to Hetzner soon, or in addition to for failover/ha. All containers. Some just docker/podman, some one k8s cluster. Mainly it's just for fun. Except the cloud and local backups for our phones/Gcloud, which my wife will get really mad if it doesn't work. clean setup! I have a raspberry pi but haven't configured it yet. a few questions if you don't mind:
1. how do you manage deployments? Is it some sort of sh script or CI/CD pipeline?
2. why do you choose k8s for some services? just for learning? Gitops. I use janky infrastructure as code to manage the services running on any stateful machines, and mainly just stuff I through together.
I run k8s because everyone runs k8s now, and it's good to have a local environment to play with. you might look at this for feature ideas. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1lutdul/we_buil... tldr; We built an open-source, MIT-licensed PaaS that: Lets you scale beyond a single server. Uses API keys for team access, not SSH keys. Has a simple CLI and web UI without overwhelming configuration. Includes built-in database management (disco postgres create). Is funded by optional managed services, so that the code can remain free and open. Dokku: Great, but locked us to single servers and required managing SSH access for teams. Coolify: Powerful, but we found the sheer number of configuration options overwhelming. Kamal: Brilliant for deployment, but we wanted integrated database management and other platform features built-in. Dokku Maintainer here: Dokku supports Kubernetes as a scheduler, utilizing k3s in the background. You don't need to think about Kubernetes other than if you want a custom chart or something on the cluster. There are also plugins available that allow acl-based access, and Dokku Pro supports keys (and folks have built their own alternatives that do similar). That said, disco seems neat. Always love seeing tools in the PaaS space :) thanks for sharing. nice to see more people choosing docker swarm as an orchestrator. the idea with database management is good, been thinking about similar feature to introduce community recipes for databases and other services