2024-06-11
Server!
This is a follow up to server?, if you even care...
So I have a home server. And it mostly languished since my last update in December. With school pressing in and FreshRSS proving surprisingly difficult to install and reverse proxies were scary soz I decided to let it be for a long while.
but I'm moving soon. And I need to have a reverse proxy no matter what as we become a 15 computer household. (This isn't strictly necessary because katie!'s giving me a "subnet" or something but whatever). So, I asked katie! about it and also got a crash course in Docker Compose and how all this shit actually works. So, here's my "recently learned how to do this and so has zero nuance" runthrough of it.
Step 1: Anatomy of a compose file
So turns out the fucky Docker stuff I did for Bitwarden can be done with another thing called Docker Compose which is different enough to warrent it's own talking to (and I missed this distinction up previously). Basically, Docker makes little boxes of smaller computers in your computer and Docker Compose is the how to make the little boxes stuff. So, basically tell it what box to make (an image), where it will put stuff (volumes) and how it gets to talk to other things (ports). These have a mapping in them, like something:else. This represents where the thing actually is (represented by something) and what the thingy wants (else). This is mainly a big deal for ports, which really like 80 and 443 if you're doing anything HTTP related. So then we get into
Step 2: Reverse proxy
You need a little switch board in your computer to move the wires around. I used Caddy which was really easy to run as a docker compose dealio. The reverse proxy stuff is simple too—just a couple lines of code. and boom! I can redirect wires and set up
Step 3: You can run whatever, now
Vaultwarden and also FreshRSS and also Photoprism and also owntracks. Swapped to Vaultwarden for performance and also it unlocks the premium features, FreshRSS because I wanna try it, Photoprism for a self-hosted flickr/google photos, and owntracks to get away from gmaps location sharing (which I presently do with a few people). I'm not making the links to these available (for obvious reasons). I suppose the really nice thing here is that these little problems have neat solutions? I've been looking for a decent photo sorting and hosting thing and Photoprism seems to do that, Vaultwarden is helping me de-googlify my authenticators, and FreshRSS is a nice replacement for the janky on-device reader I got off F-Droid. I'm happy! And it hasn't been too bad (yet).