One day, I moved all services I really wanted from a couple of random VPS to a nice little proxmox machine at home (and then added some more services, of course). That was the day I swore to document stuff better, and I’m pretty satisfied with how well I was able to keep up with that.

In the proxmox web interface, you can leave notes per container. I note down which service the container is running including a link to the service’s web interface if applicable, plus the source, and a note about how it auto-updates (green check mark emoji) or if it requires manual updates (handiman emoji).

Further I made a concious effort to document everything into a gollum wiki running on that proxmox host (exposes a wiki like web interface, stores all entries as plaintext .md files into a local git repo - very “portable”). Most importantly, it also includes a page of easy to understand emergency measures in case I die or become unresponsive, which I regularly print out and put into a folder with other important documents. The page contains a QR code linking to itself on the wiki too in case the printed version might be outdated here or there.

The organization of the wiki itself (what goes into which folder) is a bit of a work in progress, but as it offers full text search, that’s not too much of a problem imo.

I use nginx for reverse proxy. You can get certbot working to automate ssl fairly easily. There is a learning curve, but most services I use have documentation for hosting their stuff with it.

Personally I use Linkwarden for keeping snapshots of websites as well as a bookmark manager and Memos for a simple note-taking app. Both can be installed on mobile as PWAs, so it makes it easier to access on-the-go.

I’m using Nginx Proxy Manager, which I highly recommend for new users due to how simple it is get set up and running! NPM renews SSL certs automatically before they expire as well (afaik). You just gotta make sure that your different Docker containers’ ports don’t collide with each other.

My documentation problem was largely fixed by using Nixos. The actual OS instances are self-documenting that way.

As far as the documentation for the network setup itself goes, a simple wiki does the rest of the trick for me.

I write everything in markdown, and I mean just about everything. Tech notes, recipes, work procedures, shopping lists…everything. If you check my comment history from today, you can see a quick example of the kind of tech notes I keep (firewalld in this case).

I keep all of my plain text files synced across multiple devices using Syncthing. For desktop editors, I use mostly vim and VSCodium (though Kate is nice too), and I use Markor on Android. This workflow has been highly efficient for many years now, and I no longer waste time constantly reviewing the latest note-taking app.

My documentation is a folder with the docker compose files I am using. And some notes in Nextcloud Notes if needed.

My reverse proxy is Traefik, since it’s docker aware. :)

So I want to get back into self hosting, but every time I have stopped is because I have lack of documentation to fix things that break. So I pose a question, how do you all go about keeping your setup documented? What programs do you use?

Joplin or Obsidian? Or… plain markdown files with your favorite text editor.

Wiki.js Nginx Proxy Manager.

I use obsidian for my notes/wiki. I use the git plugin to backup/sync my notes. I self-host forgejo as my gut server. Works great!

Caddy is my favorite reverse-proxy. The setup is just a config file.

• caddyserver for reverse proxy
• docker-compose for ~75% of documentation
• logseq for notes, though I don’t keep much.

Docker and docker-compose are nice because every service you want to run follows the same basic pattern. You don’t need much documentation beyond the project docs and the compose files themselves

Edit: caddyserver can do automatic certs, even behind a firewall if you set up the api call method. Varies by registrar

I use BookStack and with Node Red I export to PDF the books as soon as pages get updated, so if everything goes feet up, I have all the documentation in PDFs (locally and automatically uploaded to a free DropBox account, still done with Node Red).

I’m adding documentation about what I do in Joplin and I’m using Nextcloud to keep it synced.

For reverse proxy I use Nginx Proxy Manager for its simplicity. I really don’t need anything more fancy… https://nginxproxymanager.com/

Dokuwiki (dokuwiki.org) is my usual go-to. It’s really simple and stores entries in markdown files so you can get at them as plain text files in a pinch. Here’s a life lesson: don’t host your documentation in the machine you’re going to be breaking! Learned that the hard way once or twice.

For reverse proxies, I’m a fan of HAProxy. It uses pretty straightforward config files and is incredibly robust.

I’ve been using YunoHost for some time. Cosmos seems good, too. Both do most of the stuff for you and should come with documentation. I think that’s the way to go if you can’t set it all up yourself, or lack time to maintain it.

I’ve also used Docker containers and plain Debian. I use NGinx as a reverse proxy.

I document things in text files (markdown). At some point it’d like to upload them with something like mkdocs or to a wiki. But since it’s just me, having them just sitting in a directory on my laptop is fine.

Use something that’s super accessible so you’ll actually use it. I often just dump random thoughts or commands I executed into the textfiles and I have my text editor open all the time anyways. And then on the server I eiter use Ctrl+R and search through the shell history, or search in my documents. Doesn’t need to be fancy, grep -rni "keyword" does it for me.

I’m a grumpy linux greybeard type, so I went with… plain text files.

Everything is deployed via docker, so I’ve got a docker-compose.yml for each stack, and any notes or configuration things specific to that app is a comment in the compose file. Those are all backed up in a couple of places, since all I need to do is drop them on a filesystem, and bam, complete restoration.

Reverse proxy is nginx, because it’s reliable, tested, proven, works, and while it might not have all those fancy auto-config options other things have, it also doesn’t automatically configure itself into a way that I’d prefer it didn’t, either.

I don’t use any tools like portainer or dockge or nginx proxy manager at this point, because dealing with what’s just a couple of config files on the filesystem is faster (for me) and less complicated (again, for me) than adding another layer of software on top (and it keeps your attack surface small).

My one concession to gui shit for the docker is an install of dozzle because it certainly makes dealing with docker logs simple, and it simplifies managing the ~40 stacks and ~85 containers that I’ve got setup at the moment.