I've written a series of blog posts about a "hands-off" self-hosting setup intended for relative beginners.

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Nice, thanks for that! Bonus points for using DockGE, I prefer that over portainer as well!

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Hell yeah, dude.

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This is appreciated. As a hobbyist, I feel like my setup is hold by pins.

EDIT: I rely on Nextcloud, BTW.

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This is very cool, but also very dangerous. Many projects release versions that need some sort of manual intervention to be updated, and automatically updating to new versions on docker can lead to data loss in those situations.

Here’s a recent example from Immich:

https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/tag/v1.133.0

It is my humble opinion that teaching newbies to do automatic updates will cause them to lose data and break things, which will probably sour them from ever self hosting again.

Automatic OS updates are fine, and docker update notifications are fine, but automatic docker updates are just too dangerous.

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That's reasonable, however, my personal bias is towards security and I feel like if I don't push people towards automated updates, they will leave vulnerable, un-updated containers exposed to the web. I think a better approach would be to push for backups with versioning. I forgot to add that I am planning a "backups with Syncthing" article as well, I will take this into consideration, add it to the article, and use it as a way to demonstrate recovery in the event of such an issue.

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Naturally, the same day that I publish this, I discover that Watchtower is semi-abandoned, so I'm gonna have to look into alternatives to that...

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My experience after 35 years in IT: I've had 10x more outages caused by automatic updates than everything else combined.

Also after 35 years of running my own stuff at home, and practically never updating anything, I've never had an outage caused by a lack of updates.

Let's not act like auto updates is without risk. Just look at how often Microsoft has to roll out a fix for something an update broke. Inexperienced users are going to be clueless when an update breaks something.

We should be teaching new people how to manage systems, this includes proper update checks on a cycle, with appropriate validation that everything works afterwards, and the ability to roll back if there's an issue.

This isn't an Enterprise where you simply can't manually manage updates across hundreds or thousands of servers, and tens of thousands of workstations - this is a single admin, small environment.

I do monthly update checks, update where I feel it's warranted, and verify systems afterwards.

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Just call me Mr. BuzzKill. LOL I learned that there is a fork at https://watchtower.devcdn.net/. Deployed it yesterday, and for the first round of updates, everything went as it should. No runs, no drips, no errors. Time will tell.

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I use diun for update notifications. I wish there was something that could send me a notification, and if I gave it an okay or whatever it would apply the update. Maybe with release notes for the latest version so I could quickly judge if I need to do anything besides update.

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In case it’s of help, a common problem I find with guides in general is that they assume I don’t already use Apache (or some other service), and describe as though I’m starting with a clean system. As a newbie, it’s hard to know what damage the instructions will do to existing services, or how to adapt the instructions.

Since docker came along it’s gotten easier, and I’ve learned enough about ports etc to be able to avoid collisions. But it would be great if guides and tutorials in general covered that situation.

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Thanks

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Even though I’m already experienced in self-hosting, I absolutely love that you’re making this available. We need more on-ramps for newbies. Cheers!

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Sweet! Thank you!
I'll test it out and update the blog posts to reflect that

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Hmmmm that's a good point. I'll try to work. that in P: cause Tailscale can cause issues if you're already doing Wireguard or something.

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This is great, thanks!

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Immich is still unstable. This shouldn't happen to a stable project.

What it tells me is that you need a regular backup

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I don't disagree with any of that, I'm merely making a different value judgement - namely that a breach that could've been prevented by automatic updates is worse than an outage caused by the same.

I will however make this choice more explicit in the articles and outline the risks.

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Set up automatic updates

Immich

You like to live dangerously, right?

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Raid is a backup

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This absolutely can happen to stable projects. This has happened with Mastodon many times, and Mastodon has been stable for years.

It also has happened with Nextcloud many times, and again, Nextcloud has been stable for years.

It’s not a stability thing, it’s an automation thing. We as devs can only automate so much. At a certain point, it becomes up to you, as the administrator, to manually change things. Things like infrastructure changes, and database migrations, where the potential downtime if we automate it is something we need to consider.

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I've written a series of blog posts about a "hands-off" self-hosting setup intended for relative beginners.