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Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

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Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#201

Post by anderspitman »

d1plo1d wrote: post #162
anderspitman wrote: post #82

The hardware is there (RPi + USB storage). The server software is there (NextCloud, Plex, n8n, etc). What isn't there is the plumbing. The next logical step after this blog post is making your services accessible to your phone over the public net. You'll immediately find yourself mired in domain name registration, VPS management, TLS cert management, dyndns, port forwarding, hole punching, etc etc. There are lots of…

I tunnel everything through webRTC. It's a bit exotic but it gets you a direct bidirectional data connection to the self hosted device. You can put all users' self hosted content through a single domain name & SSL cert or you could have subdomains automatically provisioned for each device. I'm using this WebRTC method for 3D printers at https://tegapp.io

Can you provide more details on what software you're using for WebRTC tunneling?

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#202

Post by jeroenhd »

milankragujevic wrote: post #130
z3t4 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most home routers have functionality to do port forwarding and dyndns. Certbot for TLS/cert. Just get a free domain from the dyndns service. No VPS needed if you got your own hardware/Rasbery. Make sure you have backups. Just Dont expect a $30 PC to be without issues.

Of course they do, but a lot of people are behind CGNAT and do not have a public IP address assigned to their CPE, and as such reaching a device in the LAN from the outside - without the device reaching out to you first - is impossible. And, of course, it can't reach out to your phone because it's also behind CGNAT. So, you need a VPS to act as a bridge between your phone and the device, which would connect to the VP…

CGNAT is a pain but if you have that type of internet connection you should just forget about hosting anything from home. Maybe ipv6 works if you're lucky, but your ISP clearly won't make it easy for you.

A VPS with a VPN works but there's alternatives. Some online services provide free port forwards/port forwards for a price (ngrok style) or if push comes to shove and you only need access yourself, you can probably host your services on a Tor hidden service and bookmark it.

I don't think I've seen that many ISPs do CGNAT though. Even mobile carriers often expose some ports to the outside world for IoT crap with a SIM card. Maybe CGNAT is more prevalent in other countries but that doesn't mean other people can make use of these guides.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#203

Post by anderspitman »

erulabs wrote: post #175
johnjungles wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out KubeSail! Not affiliated in anyway. They make it super easy to do the plumbing, networking and have a kubernetes cluster on a raspberry pi. If you ever wanted to learn k8s without spending $80\month on a cluster, best way to learn it!

Thanks for the shout-out! I wanted to post "we do exactly this!" but didn't want to be an advertisement, so I appreciate it :P (co-founder of KubeSail, if anyone has any questions!)

Cool tech. Does KubeSail integrate domain purchasing? Why should I be required to learn kubernetes just to tunnel a local webserver to a public domain name?

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#204

Post by anderspitman »

homedrive wrote: post #165
anderspitman wrote: post #82

The hardware is there (RPi + USB storage). The server software is there (NextCloud, Plex, n8n, etc). What isn't there is the plumbing. The next logical step after this blog post is making your services accessible to your phone over the public net. You'll immediately find yourself mired in domain name registration, VPS management, TLS cert management, dyndns, port forwarding, hole punching, etc etc. There are lots of…

HomeDrive ( https://www.homedrive.io ) is plumbing exactly this! We are currently only hosting Nextcloud, but we plan to support more apps and custom dockers. It is as easy as plugging the box into the home router. There are still many features to implement, but we are working towards "easy self-hosting at home", and looking for early adopters.

How would you compare yourselves to KubeSail, mentioned above?

Why limit it to specific software, rather than simply port mapping?

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#205

Post by jeroenhd »

anderspitman wrote: post #82

The hardware is there (RPi + USB storage). The server software is there (NextCloud, Plex, n8n, etc). What isn't there is the plumbing. The next logical step after this blog post is making your services accessible to your phone over the public net. You'll immediately find yourself mired in domain name registration, VPS management, TLS cert management, dyndns, port forwarding, hole punching, etc etc. There are lots of…

There's a lot of solutions sibling comments have already brought up, but I don't know if it should be this automagical. Keeping services up to date requires effort, money, or a big reduction in freedom of what you can do with your server.

There's a full-automatic mail server program, maininabox, that tries to be this instant "just make it work" system. The result of the project is that the host OS was severely outdated for years because upgrading configuration automatically is difficult and because the system manages DNS for you, adding a new subdomein to your server is more of a challenge than it should be.

Similarly, automatic service install and management tools like Plesk, cPanel, ISPconfig have been around forever but they always provide some limitation. I think Sandatorm.IO is a quite recent tool of this sort that runs Docker so you have a bit more control.

All of these still require occasional maintenance though. If you can't figure out how to point a DNS name and a wildcard to your IP, then I'm not sure if you should be exposing services on the internet like that. If you don't update for a while your nice, powerful server Raspberry Pi might suddenly be DDOS'ing random websites without you even knowing about it, and all you can do to prevent that is to keep your (limited) software stack updated.

All attempts to make this easy for the general public have so far shown that people don't like to press the update button; even rebooting Windows is a risk some people just aren't willing to take, which is why Microsoft had to force reboots in Windows 10. With that kind of risk out there, freely connecting whatever to the web and forgetting about it, I'm glad there's some technical requirements before you can host something.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#206

Post by troyjfarrell »

jeroenhd wrote: post #205
anderspitman wrote: post #82

The hardware is there (RPi + USB storage). The server software is there (NextCloud, Plex, n8n, etc). What isn't there is the plumbing. The next logical step after this blog post is making your services accessible to your phone over the public net. You'll immediately find yourself mired in domain name registration, VPS management, TLS cert management, dyndns, port forwarding, hole punching, etc etc. There are lots of…

There's a lot of solutions sibling comments have already brought up, but I don't know if it should be this automagical. Keeping services up to date requires effort, money, or a big reduction in freedom of what you can do with your server. There's a full-automatic mail server program, maininabox, that tries to be this instant "just make it work" system. The result of the project is that the host OS was severely outdat…

Sandstorm(.io) is very cool, and it does make managing your self-hosted web apps very easy. But it does not run Docker containers and it only runs on Linux x86-64. (There have been some attempts at running Docker containers with Sandstorm, but they are not easy to use.) Instead, the web applications must be specifically packaged for Sandstorm.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#207

Post by christian_fei »

yegle wrote: post #69

For anyone with a home server and has the need to remotely access your self-hosted websites, https://pomerium.io has been a wonderful piece of software in my stack. You can safely expose your self-hosted websites to the internet and without the hassle of needing to have a VPN connection first.

that's cool!

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#208

Post by christian_fei »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #105
christian_fei wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is interesting, thanks! sounds like a super smooth dev and deploy experience

Docker on ARM is not a smooth experience. Hardly anyone builds containers for ARM so you end up either building everything yourself or finding weird -arm versions of popular containers.

have you seen this? https://hub.docker.com/u/arm32v7

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#209

Post by christian_fei »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #142
christian_fei wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, good points. Gotta try your suggestion regarding the missing flag on the ffmpeg side and report back, out of interest. I’m on service battery since a long time in fact I consider this setup only temporary, and will soon upgrade to a modern machine

Set the encoder to omx on the pi as well to take advantage of accelerated h264 encoding.

will try!

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#210

Post by christian_fei »

oblib wrote: post #160

A DigitalOcean vps can be a pretty inexpensive and easy option. I've done this with a Pi and Dyndns. It's pretty easy to setup but not as good (for me) as a DO vps because my home ISP limits data heading out. I would have to purchase a business plan to fix that and it still wouldn't be better or cheaper than what DO and others can provide. A Pi can be used for development on your home network and it excels at that. A…

yep, noticed the same. a lot of containers are not available for arm, and thus you'll need to build them yourself..
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