If you have tried several self-hosting platforms like the above, please share your experience.
I have so far only tried Yunohost and I’m quite satisfied. It does help to read French, sometimes solutions can be hidden in French forum topics.
Coop Cloud seems to be docker-based, as far as I understand, and I just never managed to wrap my head around containers and why I should use them. Not sure though if Yunohost does container stuff in the background that I am not aware of?
I’ve just started to use my Yunohost installation for some small scale collaborative stuff so I really hope it scales (to probably not more than 100 users) and keeps running smoothly. Starting to host common stuff is a little more scary than just fucking up my own private files.
I don’t think YunoHost uses containers, at least it didn’t the last time I used it. It installs applications natively.
The best part about using containers for self hosting is that you don’t have to locally install dependencies for anything you want to run; they’re all inside the container. So if something doesn’t work, blow away the container and any data it created. Uninstalling a locally installed app can be a pain as you’re left with all the installed dependencies and any configuration that may not have been removed.
Another benefit of containers is that it’s generally easy to update an app to a new version by downloading and running a newer version of the container and maybe running a migration command. Updating a locally installed app means installing newer versions of dependencies before running any migrations.
The upshot is that I personally find containers easier and cleaner to deal with than locally installed apps.
As nice as Yunohost and similar platforms are, IMHO you quickly get to a point where they hold you back. It can be fine if the limited set of features is all you want, but I have seen people outgrow these platforms very quickly.
It’s great to be able to run a server with functioning stuff on it when one doesn’t know anything about servers. Anything else around self-hosting would have been too much of an intimidating learning curve for me, but in the meantime I’ve picked up a lot of knowledge and terminology just by running the YH. It’s like training wheels, it’s great if you know a bit of tech stuff, but not enough.
I think it will last me a while before I outgrow it, don’t have enough time to really sit down and study server administration to the point where I feel safe to not fuck it up. I’ll let you know 😅
Yunohost tries to avoid using Docker as much as they can. In fact I would be surprised if you found Docker in use in any Yunohost app. Coop Cloud looks interesting but when it comes to usability Yunohost is clearly ahead. Another way to easily self host is the freemium https://www.cloudron.io/ though the admin interface software does not have a familiar open source license last time I looked.
@lemmyreader @schmorpel I’m using Yunohost for several years now. It is very comfy for a non-programmer to maintain. Also quite stable, except a few weird failures to restore backups. The biggest downsize is that app packaging needs to be maintained by someone. You get updates only when a packager brings you that update. For example, Discourse package is abandoned and now is so outdated that almost unusable.
Agreed, Yunohost is a pleasure to use. Discourse is quite a complex software package to install, therefore Discourse themselves recommend to use Docker for installing Discourse.
Are they anti-container or just anti-Docker, I wonder?
Here is a personal opinion from a YH forum moderator. https://forum.yunohost.org/t/yunohost-docker-containerized-app-packaging/27900/3 That forum thread shows one more self host option : https://cosmos-cloud.io/
And beware, Docker may be very popular but it also has drawbacks. One issue is that Docker can give firewall issues with ufw and if I remember correctly also with Yunohost.
