Self Hosting - The journey continues

Okay so I recently decided to properly try and setup a home network with alternatives to the various free services that I use currently.

So with that in mind I mapped out all of the things that I use on a regular to semi regular basis:

• Email: Mostly self hosted with a Gmail for signing into stuff I don’t want to hear from
• Documents: I rarely use it, but generally I’ll use Google Docs when I want to write something or do a basic spreadsheet
• Photo/File storage: I’m using GDrive to carry my photos (both as an offsite backup and a way to share images to friends and family
• Source Code Management: Github for the moment. Mainly for my site, but there’s a couple of old repos for things like an ancient Android App I picked up maintenance for.
• Site Hosting: I manage this myself on a Linode
• Website CMS: Selfhosted on the same Linode as Site hosting
• Social Media: Mostly Mastodon or Bluesky at the moment. I’ve hosted federated social software before (remember Statusnet? Anyone?). At the moment I am pretty content with my Mastodon existence remaining in the inestimable hands of @shlee and the rest of the crew at aus.social
• Task Tracker: I try to be organised, I really do. And when I am organised, I tend to use tools like Trello[https://trello.com/] to track tasks along.

Right now I’m playing with two self hosted platforms that COULD solve almost all of the above.

NextCloud AIO

So NextCloud bills itself as an “Open Source Online Collaboration Platform”. It offers:

• File Management
• Video Communications
• Groupware – Calendar/Contacts/Mail etc
• Office Suite (based off Libreoffice)
• All in a nice web interface

I’ve installed the AIO version of NextCloud.

Mostly it was an easy experience to setup, BUT it does require that you host it via a fully qualified domain name that is discoverable via public DNS. This means that you will either need to have a domain that you can use OR you will have to setup a local DNS and get it to look at that rather than the public one.

Sigh.

Anyway once you get passed the setup, it’s all pretty familiar. I installed it last week and over the past week I’ve been starting to force myself to use it rather than the online foo. In fact as it happens I’m using it to polish this post before I send it up to the CMS.

Gitea

Gitea is one of a number of Github alternatives that are floating around. I’ve only just installed it and haven’t finished setting it up so I can’t say much about yet. I’ll write more as and when I remember (I might put a task into NextCloud to remind me in three months to write a follow up)

There’s lots to explore, aside from the above I also want to find a decent financial management package, a way to manage smart devices, better media management etc etc.

So could be fun!