I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.
I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.
I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)
Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.
Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.
Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!
The responses you get here are from people that have already perfected their setup so take them with a grain of salt.
I mean I have my setup running with Traefik, Crowdsec, Authentik and that’s before the request even reaches the application.
2 months ago that was only Traefik.
A year before that I was using Nginx Proxy Manager instead of Traefik because it was easier to manage and understand.
Half the fun is evolving your homelab. Trying to start out with the full stack of things someone suggests is daunting and nearly impossible.
Take things one step at a time. And honestly if you don’t understand what the documentation is talking about, YouTube videos are great. I’ve had to use it lots to understand how Authentik works but now I understand the docs