I’ve been dabbling with selfhosting for a bit now (home assistant and nextcloud), but it’s clear that I lack a fundamental understanding of networking. For example:
- I’ve got OpenWRT on my router, but no idea what I’m doing when it comes to firewall settings, DNS, DHCP, etc.
- I’ve got a domain thru Porkbun, but no idea how to properly setup my DNS settings there to route to my local machine.
- I’ve got NGINX running in a docker container in a VM and can get to the UI on my local network, but no idea what I’m doing wrong with my attempts at a reverse proxy.
Does anyone here have links to a good in-depth tutorial series for learning about securely selfhosting?
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In the past, I’ve found a lot of valuable resource at
One thing you really need to establish right from the start is the habit of taking detailed notes. It’s tedious, bothersome at times, but the ability to backtrack something that may not have deployed quite like you wanted, is invaluable. It will also save your ass in a month when you’ve forgotten everything you did before.
Take notes!
Yup, good notes are really the difference between beginner and expert self-hosters. Write the notes as if they’re documentation to be read by someone who has never seen them before. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll remember things; that is the devil talking. You will forget in 6 months when you’re looking at it again.
I have some script or maybe it was a program in a container that checks my isp IP and uses the domain provider api to keep the DNS set to the isp IP if it changes. I’m using opnsense but I’m sure openwrt has the same thing in some form.
That’s just DDNS. There are different ways to do it, and some routers come with a DDNS service ready to go. DuckDNS is commonly recommended. There are even images like Cloudflare-DDNS, which allow you to run it in a container.
Studying computer science / Cybersecurity certainly helped. Besides that, trial and error for me.
Great guides https://www.simplehomelab.com/
Sounds like you should just explore TCP, IP, subnetting, routing, and DNS on their own, not necessarily from the perspective of self-hosting.
I find Wikipedia to be a great source for learning new topics. I know you asked for videos, but you can still give it a shot. Plus you can take detours while reading about a topic by clicking on links in the article. This gives a more well-rounded understanding IMO.
I am saving this thread to try and find a good tutorial for myself. That said, I have had a great experience on #networking on libera.chat, which is IRC. They have been very patient with me and often willing to go into detail in a beginner-friendly way.
Unfortunately, they are not accessible via the web chat, so you have to use an IRC client and register and account, which is relatively painless, but might take 10 to 15 minutes to get started.
Idk of any good series but techno Tim has a great video on using cloudflare and traefik to get wildcard letsencrypt ssls for your docker services.
Check FUTO’s guide. It’s great for beginners:
- Part 1: https://youtu.be/Et5PPMYuOc8
- Part 2: https://youtu.be/3fW9TV1WQi8
I think NetworkChuck has a good set of tutorial videos about self hosting. For the most part you can search for what you want to find info on and he probably had a video on it. E.g. Nginx: https://m.youtube.com/@NetworkChuck/search?query=Nginx
@theit8514 @anticonnor I tried to watch one of his videos (it was 20 minutes ) after the first two minutes in before he actually provided any facts. I think it got a bit better. But in terms of starting out with selfhosting I’m not sure where I would start in his videos.
I’ll check him out, thanks!
When I was stumbling on some of his output it unfortunately felt very click-baity, always playing on your FOMO if you didn’t set up/download/buy the next best thing until the other next best thing in the video after.
In other words, I think he’s cool to check out to get to know of a thing, but to get a deeper level of understanding how a thing works I would recommend written materials. There are good caddy/nginx tutorials out there, but a linux networking book will get your understanding further yet.
If it has to be video, I would at least recommend a little more slowed down, long-form content like Learn Linux TV.
Well my first reply is: setting up yor own router is like to learn driving with a touring car. You just need to know a lot to set up/handle everything properly. Its just not easy and in m opinion the most wrong point to start.
DNS-wise I would like to recommend something like pihole. To me it was my first thing I installed and used until this day and also the handling of DNS is quite easy. Maybe you should consider lerning other things before setting up your own router.
@Nephalis @anticonnor I think there are two approaches. 1) Start with desktop linux, a vps or raspberrypi to start building linux and networking skills or;
2) start with something more packaged that provides more guidance on delivering services ‘out of the box’ like yunhost - which can provide some things off the rack services and with a templated approach - that then allows you to play around a bit while you learn the basics@Nephalis @anticonnor Yunohost has a starting point for setting up an instance - yunohost.org/#start @elena is also writing something up.
I’m a bit farther along, but it’s all been trial and error (and error, and error…) So, commenting because I would also like some of this info. My DNS is a disaster! Still using IPs to access my VMs, mostly.
I am relatively sophisticated on LAN/local services (been running Raspberry Pi since 2018 or so), I was never able to setup a reverse proxy to get a true self-hosted system (i.e. remote access); got roadblocked by nginx and setting up letsencrypt with reverse proxy support.
In general, true remote access is IMO exponentially more difficult and demanding than getting things running on your local network.
For anyone starting out with self-hosting, I would strongly recommend LAN/local services where you can relatively easily deploy multiple very useful and powerful services (SMB/NAS, Jellyfin, Pi-hole, Qbittorrent-Nox).
I would suggest looking into DietPi, it’s IMO the best RaspberryPi/SBC distribution there is if you want things to just work and not bug you. Very helpful developers and community too. Excellent, user friendly CLI management tools for headless operation.
You basically never want to expose your local network to the internet. The most secure and simple way are either Tailscale or WireGuard combined with a VPS that is exposed to the internet and takes all the beating.
Yeah, the primary reason people end up exposing things to the internet is because of friends and family. I can call my tech-illiterate “anything more difficult than logging into Facebook has her throwing up her hands in defeat, saying it is too hard, and tech is just too complicated these days” mother-in-law and walk her through setting up Plex… But that only works because Plex is exposed to the internet. If I had to walk her through setting up Tailscale on her living room TV before she could connect, it would be a non-starter.
This what I was trying to setup when I first started (with Nginx, domain and free tier version of Google Cloud). I wasn’t able to get it all running with Nginx and HTTPS.
I use Tailscale and Nginx Proxy Manager. Very easy to get it running. I use DNS Challenge with my Domain Provider. The Domain points to my Tailscale IP. So I don’t need to open anything.
I use a similar setup with Traefik instead of Nginx PM, and Headscale instead of Tailscale. It is almost the same kind of setup.
Use caddy server instead of nginx
