I am not sure about how lightweight they are (but I guess more than WordPress for sure) but on the federated side of things you have plume (https://joinplu.me/) and writefreely (https://writefreely.org/) that you can selfhost. Not super sure about how much you can customize them.

Thanks for the composerize link, it’s super useful indeed!

Yeah I took a quick look at podman and nope for now 😂 docker compose it is and it’s working wonderfully :)

Don’t really know what some of these things are, which also means I haven’t encountered them (yet), if I will I’ll make sure to read more about it. To be honest, for now I’m just doing normal compose, everything behind tailscale. At one point I’ll need something like caddy for a reverse proxy to help with sharing services with a couple of family members, but always behind tailscale, no public exposure.

Yup I read about the folder thing but got stung by it as well ahah

Thank for taking the time to explain, I am almost done with the transition of all my services and I did exactly like you suggested and everything works perfecty! :)

Ah! I started with Yunohost too (and actually still have it on a Pi), definitely opened the port for all this in a nice way!

I agree with you on Docker, it can get complicate but the basics are very very easy. I would probably go with DockGe, I tried both before but didn’t like much portainer :)

But thanks for both comments :)

One day I will look into NixOS, I am eyeing it for a while now, but I don’t feel confident enough with my Linux skills to switch. However, I do agree with you, and it’s exactly what I am doing, stripping the compose files of all the CasaOS stuff, use one per service, and versioning them in git. I am also learning about .env files and other things that I wasn’t really aware of before, it’s fun and very customizable :)

Thanks for all the suggestions :)

The first jump to Debian was the most intimidating for me learning CLI commands for the first time and not having defaults chosen for me, but it was liberating to finally learn the actual tools and not just learn a GUI abstraction for tools.

I feel it, I am in the process now of transporting everything and I couldn’t agree more. I have a semi-idea of trying nixOS sometime, and I only recently learned about podman existence, is it that different to docker? I read it’s not a 100% replacement, but I guess it depends on the use-cases.

I see Proxmox mentioned a lot, but haven’t had the time to test it out. I will stick with Debian+Docker for now, but if it’s that convenient I might take a look at it one day :)

And you can experiment as much as you want and break stuff.

I really like this part especially

Thank you! And thanks for sharing your experience :)

Thank you for the answer :)

I don’t know much about CasaOS, but presumably you have the ability to stop your containers and access the filesystem to copy their config and mapped volumes elsewhere?

Yes absolutely, they provide a nice filebrowser which can also be mounted as a samba share (which they setup during install), in case one doesn’t want to use the terminal for everything.

As far as networking, from what I could see the only real change casaos was doing was mapping its dashboard to port 80, but not much more. Is there anything more I should be aware in general?

When self-hosting, the more you know about how things actually work, the easier it is to fix when something is acting up, and the easier it is to make known good backups and restore them.

Exactly, I feel I am at the point where I got my hands dirty enough that I can dive deeper into knowing things, not necessarily immediately, but step-by-step.

Nice to know that someone did the same move, and happy that it went well :) did you have anything specific to remove from the CasaOS compose files? (I know they fill it with a lot of stuff useful for their categorization)

This is exactly how I feel! Everything works but I feel there is a lot that was "“forced’” on me that I don’t use, and conversely a lot that is going on 24/7 and I don’t really know how it works.

Archwiki is really an invaluable source of information, I use it regularly even if I never touched Arch.

Nice to know I am not alone! And I only recently started with linux, so I guess it’s not really something that goes away with time 😂

I need to take a look at an immutable OS sooner or later, although I feel I would be annoyed for not being able to modify stuff for my liking (probably I will never be satisfied in any case)

Thanks for the answer : downtime isn’t a problem since I am the only one using the server for now, and I still have leftovers from a previous setup (stremio, local music) for the days I will be without the server.

You are absolutely right, I haven’t checked the backups yet, but I will make sure to do it. I was thinking to wipe radarr or sonarr, reinstall the container and restore from their manual backups, to see if everything works. For Immich is probably safer to start from scratch, I don’t have that many photos backed-up anyway and I heard it might not always work.

Thanks for the suggestion! Yes I was grabbing everything that casaos didn’t have from linuxserver.io, and read some of their stuff too, but I will be sure to check also dockerrun :) Downtime isn’t a problem since I am the only one using the server for now, and I still have leftovers from a previous setup (stremio, local music)

Unfortunately I am not going to be able to afford a new hardware upgrade for a while, but otherwise yes that would have been the safest solution :)