(This is a repost of this reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1fbv41n/what_are_the_things_that_makes_a_selfhostable/, I wanna ask this here just in case folks in this community also have some thoughts about it)
What are the things that makes a selfhostable app/project project good? Maybe another way to phrase this question is, what are the things that makes a project easier to self-host?
I have been developing an application that focuses on being easy to selfhost. I have been looking around for existing and already good project such as paperless-ngx, Immich, etc.
From what I gather the most important thing are:
- Good docs, this is probably the most important. The developer must document how to self-host
- Less runtime dependency–I’m not sure about this one, but the less it depends on other services the better
- Optional OIDC–I’m even less sure about this one, and I’m also not sure about implementing this feature on my own app as it’s difficult to develop. It seems that after reading this subreddit/community, I concluded that lots of people here prefer to separate identity/user pool and app service. This means running a separate service for authentication and authorization.
What do you think? Another question is, are there any more good project that can be used as a good example of selfhostable app?
Thank you
Some redditors responded on the post:
- easy to install, try, and configure with sane defaults
- availabiity of image on dockerhub
- screenshots
- good GUI
I also came across this comment from Hacker News lately, and I think about it a lot
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40523806
This is what self-hosted software should be. An app, self-contained, (essentially) a single file with minimal dependencies.
Not something so complex that it requires docker. Not something that requires you to install a separate database. Not something that depends on redis and other external services.
I’ve turned down many self-hosted options due to the complexity of the setup and maintenance.
Do you agree with this?
See it in a broader scope. If I’d only host Lemmy with is multiple mandatory things, I couldn’t care less, but I already have some other applications that I run via Docker. Fortunately I was able to keep the footprint small, no multiple containers or volumes for one application, but as said: those exist. And they would clutter the setup and make it harder to maintain an manage.
I also stand by my point that it is counter-intuitive to have multiple containers and volumes for just one single application.
Ok but is there room for the idea that your intuitions are incorrect? Plenty of things in the world are counter-intuitive. ‘docker-compose up -d’ works the same whether it’s one container or fifty.
Computer resources are measured in bits and clock cycles, not the number of containers and volumes. It’s entirely possible (even likely) that an all-in-one container will be more resource-heavy than the same services split across multiple containers. Logging from an all-in-one will be a jumbled mess, troubleshooting issues or making changes will be annoying, it’s worse in every way except the length of output from ‘docker ps’
docker psor Portainer as a nice web-UI wrapper around the Docker commands are the two main use cases with Docker I have have on a regular basis.No, thank you. I am not going to maintain fifty containers and fifty + X volumes for just a handful of applications and will alway prefer self-contained applications over applications that spread over multiple containers for no real reason.