Show HN: HomelabOS – Ansible scripts to deploy self hosted cloud services

The biggest pain point is installation. Most selfhosted software has a ton of dependencies to install first. And after that there's usually some configuration that has to be done before it will work. A complicated installation is enough to drive even tech savy users away.

I've had some luck with my own software by targeting Windows users as well. Most people don't want to setup a linux box just to selfhost a single piece of software.

I use an aws lambda running flask with a password to expose a website where I can IP whitelist any other servers to the requesting IP, it sends me an email when an IP is added and I periodically clear them all (try to do when leaving if on public wifi).

It's a kind of very low-tech but I think very decent extra first layer of security, none of my servers are visible to anyone most of the time but I can hit them whenever.

Also, I don't expose any of it directly to the internet.

IMHO Docker has been a godsend for deploying self-hosted software.

I haven't tried it yet, but watchtower (https://github.com/v2tec/watchtower) can be used to automatically update running Docker containers.

Given that the name is "HomelabOS", I'm sure that this is aimed at people who are doing this because they find it fun and/or to learn new technologies, not people who firmly believe this is the most efficient way to run production software.

Including these fabled "cloud services" that everyone believes have no down time..... yet I get alerts monthly from these various services about unplanned outages of this service or that service for the various "cloud" products my company uses...

Services from major companies like Microsoft who has all kinds of issues with their Office 365 Product, and in addition to the endless Windows 10 and office Activation server issues...

While it looks good on the marketing brochure to have "good quality third party provider who has a team that is paid to actively maintain and secure the product," reality is often very very different.

I prefer the control, and responsibility. Others prefer to loose control and have the ability to "blame the vendor".

The key to avoid the burden is to restrict the scope of your services to what you actually need.

Let me elaborate.

I've been hosting my own email (plus something else) at home for the last five years or so. So far, so good: various services signup, job-related email exchanges, no problems.

I rarely touch my home server and I mostly do software upgrades. I run postfix, and when configuring virtual users on virtual domains, I invested an afternoon to actually go trough the documentation and came up with a reasonably simple configuration where all the data about users and domains is stored on simple text files: no SQL database to manage (not even SQLite).

Such a solution is easy to back up and easy to interact with.

For more adventurous testing, I just have another machine.

That's true. I was running email, personal web server, and VPN with soverign and that worked really weell for years until it didn't.

Still, that is a long time of pretty functional work.

At this point, I know enough professionally to run my stuff just fine, so I do. But seriously, although I will never get the 3-5 hours of time that it took me to debug my mailserver setup back, that was spent almost 5 years ago and I haven't had to touch it since, really.

A lot of this stuff really does run just fine once you have it setup. I didn't find the maintenance burden all that high even when I knew less about these systems than I do now.

I am often surprised about how often docker images are updated and auto-spun up in my home environment.

It did take me quite a bit of time to set up though, and understand what I was doing. I would be incredibly hesitant to run what was in the link, as I have no understanding of how it works, security issues, etc.

That said, for transient development purposes it's perfect. As an on-prem replica of object storage/S3, it's tantalizingly close but not quite there. Maybe it's improved in the last year or so since I last used it...

Pi-hole out of the box support is a bit wonky at the moment, I've been working on it, but it's not quite to the point you described just yet. Contributions encouraged!

Those both sound great to me, and again, Merge Requests are highly encouraged. :)

In general though it looks like they are taking a very different approach to deployments as a whole. They describe some of those differences here: https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps

While I won't get into the specifics of the pros and cons of each of their bullet points, I will say HomelabOS arose (as some of the other commenters have pointed out) as a way for people interested in this sort of thing to experiment with it. Sandstorm looks more geared toward being usable by 'anyone', which is an admirable goal, if perhaps a bit ambitious in my mind.

Additionally the plan is to move to Kubernetes soon for multiple node deployment, and that wouldn’t really be possible without Docker.

And to be clear, some software is installed directly by Ansible, where it makes sense to do so.

Regarding multiple users, it really just sets up an admin user for most services. Any multiple user support is then up to each service individually. But if you're asking if it does automated separate instances of services for different users, then no, it does not do that.