I have started setting up a server with three domains and three users using Yunohost, but I find it hard to get to work.

The documentation can be frustrating to go through and the community on the forum answers slowly or not at all (because due to the sparse documentation questions from beginners like me tend to touch similar topics I guess). A big part of the forum answers are in French, which I don’t read very well.

All in all I have been trying very hard to like the project. The work done by the developers really deserves all my respect and I would love to remain involved, but trying to get Yunohost to work as a non-techie leaves me often desperate and looking for alternatives with a more active community or a more thorough documentation.

I’m a bit divided here. I like the project but I’m a half-techie stoopid who needs more support. What do? And what would be my alternatives on a Linux VPS? Especially if I don’t want proprietary stuff?

  • Linyeir
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    11 months ago

    I have been using yunohsot for ages now and i really do like it very much. I had little to no problems most of which i could solve myself. And if i couldnt, i found the time for answers in the forum were quite okay, considering that they are volunteering their time.

    Yes, there are some limitations on packages and stuff, but the alternative is using docker and portainer and hours of fiddeling with configurations that i am just not able to invest.

    If you could be specific about your problems maybe i could answer them and add them to the documentation.

    • schmorpOP
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      11 months ago

      There is so much that does work with Yunohost, and I wish I could just sort out the difficulties and not have to learn something more complex - it’s not justified for such a tiny use case.

      First, I don’t understand if there’s a difference between admin user and the user I specify in the first setup, and how that related to file and folder access. If I want admin access over ssh, do I login as ‘firstuser@mydomain.com’ or as ‘admin@mydomain.com’?

      Ultimately I’ve just looked into this admin stuff because I need SFTP access to my dokuwiki and can’t seem to get it to work. First user has access to a few folders, but not the ones dokuwiki actually is in. Trying to get access via SFTP, I managed to ruin my entire server yesterday thanks to playing with file permissions (and learned that changing file permissions in the command line = DANGER!)

      Also, but less important unless I want a lot of wikis, I would like to run Dokuwiki in a farm setup (one Dokuwiki installation, several wikis). Same problem around file access, because I cannot create a directory for the animals.

      The beauty of dokuwiki is it’s database free, simple to understand folder structure but if I cannot access it over SFTP there’s not really a point to it.

      • Linyeir
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        11 months ago

        Ah yes, the admin thingy. They changed how admin-permission work with a recent version, maybe they havent changed all documentation yet.

        My current understanding: The user you created on first setup is the admin user, or rather it is in the admin group and therefore has admin rights.

        And regarding the sftp acces to doukwiki i have not experience, but someone on github has a solution for a similiar problem, maybe this could help with permissions. https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/dokuwiki_ynh/issues/83

      • ex_06
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        11 months ago

        users

        Every admin group user is an admin, you get to specify the first one because without one you wouldn’t be able to use the web portal.

        When in doubt, anyway, you can just use SUDO or su to get to root.

        file permissions

        I use it for Joplin and my easy way to do this is just installing nextcloud, striping it all of the things I don’t need, mount all the folders into it and just use it as SFTP

        An alternative is FileBrowser but there was something bugged so I kept nextcloud.

        one installation more wikis

        I don’t think you can. Or maybe yunohost does it automatically because it usually shares resources, they are not containered… I would probably just install more of them.

        All the issues I’ve got with yunohost during these years are basically divided into 2 categories:

        • it’s because I’m selfhosting at home with a Pi
        • the package was bad

        Maybe I’ll pass to basic sysadmin too one day, or I’ll try abra from coopcloud but Yuno is really good imo :)

        They recently added the possibility to have keys of the domains they give you, so also using their domain cuts a lot of overhead if you don’t need to publish personal sites!

        • schmorpOP
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          11 months ago

          I use it for Joplin and my easy way to do this is just installing nextcloud, striping it all of the things I don’t need, mount all the folders into it and just use it as SFTP

          How does that work? Do you install Nextcloud inside Yunohost? Does that give you root permission to access the files of other apps on your server?

          • ex_06
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            11 months ago

            Yep, on yunohost. For the permission, it’s harder to write than to just do it. There is the external storage panel into nextcloud interface that will let you put admin nick and pass to then mount folders that are “external” to nextcloud 👍👍

            • schmorpOP
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              11 months ago

              Any Open Source alternative to nextcloud that would permit the same?

              • ex_06
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                11 months ago

                You know that nextcloud is open source, right? Btw FileBrowser should do